Sue Ella Bradshaw (1860-1925) was born in Illinois and died in San Francisco, California. Both her father and older brother died when she was a child, and she moved to San Jose, California, after her mother remarried in 1871. At age twenty-three, she travelled to Philadelphia, where she learned about Christian Science through a relative. That summer, she took Primary class instruction from Caroline D. Noyes, one of Mary Baker Eddy's students in Chicago. Back home in California, Bradshaw began taking patients as a Christian Science practitioner and then took three classes with Mary Baker Eddy at the Massachusetts Metaphysical College in Boston (Primary 1885; Normal 1886; Obstetrics 1888). Bradshaw was the first student to form a Christian Science institute (The California Metaphysical Institute), the first Christian Science practitioner on the West Coast, and the first Christian Science teacher on the West Coast to advertise in The Christian Science Journal. When the First Church of Christ, Scientist, San Francisco, was organized in 1895, the members elected Bradshaw as both a director and the First Reader. In 1893, Eddy affectionately called Bradshaw one of her "old brave armour bearers, alias, the students of years ago who have stood the storm when seas were rough (L04646)."

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