Mary Baker Eddy: The Truth and the Tradition

Mary Baker Eddy: The Truth and the Tradition (1932) is a book by Ernest Sutherland Bates, the American academic, and John V. Dittemore, a former director of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, the Christian Science mother church in Boston.

Based on several trunks' worth of primary-source material to which Dittemore had access, the book is a detailed account of the life and work of Mary Baker Eddy, the religion's founder. It was first published in New York by A. A. Knopf. Reviewing the book in 1933, Richard H. Shryock wrote: "Step by step, critically, inexorably, the authors complete the case against this greatest of modern 'health-cultists'. Their very restraint makes it the more terrible."[1]

The Christian Science church bought the copyright and publisher's plates from A. A. Knopf and suppressed the book.[2]