The Faith Doctor

The Faith Doctor is a New York novel by Edward Eggleston, published in 1891, that looks with a satirist’s eye at the fashionable faith healing and mind cure movements of the Gilded Age. Its heroine, a sincere and intelligent young woman, is drawn into the world of a faith doctor while a practical suitor and her scheming relations pull her the other way. Around the love story Eggleston sketches the drawing rooms, charities, and religious fads of wealthy Manhattan, weighing genuine belief against fraud and self delusion. The result is both a romance and a shrewd social comedy of its moment. This free PDF and EPUB offers the complete novel by one of the founders of American realism.