EMMA A. THOMPSON – a brief biograhpy

Photograph, Emma A. Thompson. Longyear Museum Collection

MRS. EMMA A. THOMPSON, C.S.D. – a brief biography.

EMMA A. THOMPSON first met Mrs. Eddy (then Mrs. Patterson) in 1862 in Portland, Maine, where both had gone to Phineas P. Quimby for treatment. Neither was permanently helped and Mrs. Thompson (then Miss Emma Morgan) returned to her parents’ home near Portland.

Some 22 years later, by then living in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Mrs. Thompson found complete healing by reading Science and Health. At the time she was reading,

Emma A. Thompson portrait by Elizabeth Piutti-Barth. Longyear Museum Collection.

Mrs. Thompson was unaware that Mrs. Eddy and Mrs. Patterson were one and the same individual until she arrived in Boston in 1886 to enter Mrs. Eddy’s Primary class at Massachusetts Metaphysical College on Columbus Avenue in Boston, Massachusetts.

Two months later, Mrs. Thompson’s name was listed as a Christian Science practitioner in The Christian Science Journal, and the following year she again returned to Boston to study with Mrs. Eddy.

Emma Thompson and her daughter, Abigail Dyer Thompson, both attended Mrs. Eddy’s last class in 1898, and Mrs. Thompson worked diligently with a group of Christian Scientists, including her daughter, to organize a church which later became Second Church of Christ, Scientist, Minneapolis.

According to records at Longyear Museum, Emma Thompson had suffered from a painful case of neuralgia of the head since childhood — a condition that, as her daughter Abigail wrote, made her mother “nearly frantic” at times (from page 8, “Memories of Mary Baker Eddy,” by Abigail Dyer Thompson, in the Longyear Museum collection).

In her forties, Mrs. Thompson began reading and studying a copy of Science and Health and was completely healed in 1884 after decades of slavery to the ailment.