Our centennial was celebrated. Emmanuel Church, 1860-1960: The First Hundred Years, compiled by Harriet Allen Robeson, was published by the Vestry. See its introduction and appendix. For its chapters about the tenures of particular rectors, please see these years:
Candlelit service on Jan. 10, 1960, in celebration of our centennial year
The Business & Professional Women’s Guild (formerly Club) had 98 members. Its officers were Miss Lydia LeBaron Walker, President; Miss Caroline G. Whitney, Vice-President and Recording Secretary; Miss Margaret A. Cooke, Corresponding Secretary; Maude D. Gowen; Treasurer. Our archives has its membership directory for that church year. The Guild was active for another decade.
Oct. 18-20. A series of five Healing Services were held with the Rev. Canon Alfred W. Price presiding, assisted by Rector Harold Sedgwick, the Rev. Dr. Rollin J. Fairbanks, and other clergy. Their hands were laid upon more than 3600 heads. After a nationwide outbreak of polio in 1955, the Salk vaccine had been widely administered. People in the Commonwealth became alarmed by a recurrence of paralytic poliomyelitis, which peaked here in September. Since about half of the patients had been properly vaccinated, the vaccine’s effectiveness was called into question. When the Sabin attenuated vaccine was distributed in oral form in 1961, the nation heaved a sigh of relief.
Dr. Fairbanks (1908-1983) was the Robert Treat Paine Professor of Pastoral Theology at Episcopal Divinity School. Canon Price (1899–1992), who had been awarded a Purple Heart for his service in WWII, was for many years an international warden of the Episcopal Church’s Order of St. Luke the Physician. His works include: Healing: The Gift of God (1955), Religion & Health (1962), and a God’s Health: Handbook for the Practice of the Church’s Ministry of Healing (1976).
Left to right: Rector Sedgwick, Dr. Fairbanks, the Rev. Don Hargrove Gross, the Rev. Canon Alfred W. Price & ?
May 12. The poet Amy Lawrence Lowell died young of a cerebral hemorrhage. She had been born in 1874 to our parishioners Katherine Bigelow Lawrence (1832-95) and Augustus Lowell (1830-1900). Many members of the Lawrence and Lowell families attended Emmanuel. Her partner Ada Dwyer Russell was the subject of many of her romantic poems. A volume of her complete works was published in 1955. She is buried in the Lowell plot (#3401) on Bellwort Path in Mt. Auburn Cemetery.
June 2. Rector Elwood Worcester presided at the funeral of Dr. Emma W. Davidson Mooers, who had been a parishioner since 1880. She had died on May 31 at 52 of streptococcal meningitis contracted when she and Dr. Elmer Ernest Southard were performing an autopsy. She was one of 13 women to receive an MD from U. of Michigan in 1884, then worked at Northampton State Hospital, McLean Hospital, and the neuropathology laboratory of Dr. Alois Alzheimer in Munich before becoming Custodian of Harvard’s Neuropathological Collection in 1910. Her articles on syphilis and other bacterial infections of the nervous system were published in the precursors to the American Journal of Psychiatry and New England Journal of Medicine. May this pioneer rise in glory!
Dr. Emma W.D. Mooers seated in center with Dr. Alois Alzheimer (back row 3d from right) and co-workers in his Laboratory for Neurology, Munich, 1909.
Credit: Wikicommons
July. Choirmaster Weston Spies Gales, young William Appleton Lawrence (1889-1968), and a cook, Mr. Wood, took thirty choirboys to Camp Lowell in Winthrop, Maine, for a fortnight of fellowship.
In response to a devastating fire in Chelsea, Emmanuel Church rented one of the few houses left standing to provide care for the homeless. The Emmanuel Relief Station offered food, clothing, and medical care for the wounded. The church arranged for medical personnel, instruments, and supplies. The house was also used for the care of women during and after childbirth.
Religion and Medicine: The Moral Control of Nervous Disorders by Worcester, Samuel McComb and Isador A. Coriat, an early psychoanalyst, was published by Moffat, Yard.
Worcester published a series of six articles about the Emmanuel Movement in the Ladies Home Journal (Oct. 1908 – March 1909).
Paphinia cristata var. Randi named for ES Rand, Jr. Painting by M. A Goossens, lithographed by P. De Pannemaeker. Lindenia – Iconographie des Orchidées (Ghent, 1887)
Edward Sprague Rand, Jr. published in New York Orchids: Description of the species and varieties grown at Glen Ridge. Lucien Linden and Emile Rodigas in their collection of plates of orchids Lindenia: Iconography of Orchids, ed. Jules Linden (Ghent, 1885-1906) named a variety of Paphinia cristata for him (randi).
See also 1873.