H. Emilie Cady (1848-1941) was a true holistic pioneer. Both a turn-of the-century homeopathic practitioner and metaphysician, she treated her patients medically and spiritually. The unique spiritual approach she taught was simple, clear and rooted in her own experience. Dr. Cady teaches that your life can be transformed by the power of your thoughts, words, and beliefs. She encourages you to find your truth as it is written in your own heart and then apply these truths in every area of your life.

Cady studied with Emma Curtis Hopkins, renowned "New Thought teacher of teachers," but remained spiritually independent. Dr. Cady was a contemporary of Emmett Fox, the popular New Thought writer; Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, co-founders of the Unity School of Christianity; Ernest Holmes, founder of the Church of Religious Science, and other great minds of the New Thought movement. H. Emilie Cady was inspired by Biblical teachings and influenced by the ideas of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Unity's textbook Lessons in Truth by H. Emilie Cady has sold over 1.5 million copies since its first publication in 1896. Inasmuch as each copy of a book of this kind is usually read by several people, over the years many millions of people have read Lessons in Truth. How famous, how widely known an author would be today if his or her book sold a million copies! That author would be on talk shows on television, lecturing in colleges, becoming more and more widely known every day. But it is safe to say that the thought of becoming widely known, famous, or rich never occurred to the author of Lessons in Truth. H. Emilie Cady just did not think in those terms.

Harriet Emilie Cady was born in 1848 in a farmhouse in Drysden, Syracuse, a beautiful and prosperous part of upstate New York. She was the daughter of a hardy pioneer. She tells us in her book How I Used Truth that her father was well known and respected in the neighbourhood. He must have had, as a pioneer, a built-in ruggedness and pesistence as well as ability to cope with whatever need developed. She spent the early part of her career as a schoolteacher in a one-room schoolhouse in her home town.

The same adventurous, self-reliant, and "can do" spirit that her father had must have led Emilie Cady to choose a career in medicine in the 1880s. Even today, over a hundred years later, men still predominate in medicine. What a drive within her it must have taken to leave schoolteaching, one of the few callings other than marriage sanctioned for women at that time, and to brave the disapproval of society to become a doctor of homeopathic medicine in New York City!

And she succeeded. It was as an established and successful physician that she first appeared on the Unity scene. Quite on her own, she had written and published a booklet called Finding the Christ in Ourselves. This came to the attention of Myrtle Fillmore, who was so impressed with it that she gave it to her husband, Charles Fillmore. He lost no time in asking permission to print and distribute the booklet and invited her to write for Unity Magazine. As a result, beginning in 1892, a number of articles by Dr. Cady appeared in the magazine and she later went on to write the Unity textbook, Lessons in Truth which has been translated into eleven languages and braille. From all over the world, from the length and breadth of the continent, letters have come, testifying to lives helped and strengthened, of physical ailments, money problems, domestic difficulties, all kinds of inharmonies adjusted, through the study of her inspired book.

Even in the wonderful world of metaphysical Truth, few have made a greater contribution or left a more shining monument to a long life of unselfish service than did Dr. H. Emilie Cady, physician and metaphysician.