In the 1830s, tuberculosis, or “consumption,” as it was known
then, was a common malady, whose cause and cure were not at all
understood. One common
treatment was “calomel” a compound that poisoned the patient as
often as it reduced the symptoms. For “Park” Quimby, a
clockmaker in Belfast, Maine, the combination of the disease and its
“cure” had caused him to give up his business and all hope of
recovery by his early thirties.
But he had a friend who was freed from the
disease, and that friend insisted he had cured himself by horseback
riding. Determined to
find relief, but too weak to ride, Quimby rented a carriage. A few hours out in the
countryside, he indeed began to feel better, but then his horse
shied and refused to pull the cart up a long, muddy hill. Still very weak, Quimby had
no choice but to get out of the carriage and lead the horse to the
top, which seemed impossible until a farmer obligingly helped him
get the horse going again.
And go, they did! The horse took off and
Quimby held on to the reins, riding “at a mad pace” through the
hills all the way back home.
Once there, Quimby was amazed to find that he felt “as strong
as ever.” He soon resumed his business, and continued it, reflecting
on the how’s and why’s of the incident, for some years.
Quimby had a scientific approach to his inquiries. Having learned the
clockmaking business as an apprentice, he was something of an
engineer, as well. And he really wanted to understand how he had
been cured of consumption.
So, when in 1838, a Dr. Collyer arrived in town
with a lecture and demonstration of the strange new European
phenomenon called “mesmerism” (known today as hypnosis), Quimby was
in the audience. He was fascinated, immediately began to read
whatever he could on the topic, and practiced it on any willing
subject. Not surprisingly in that relatively small community, he
soon began to develop a reputation. One doctor, for example,
wrote to a colleague that he had performed an operation using only
Quimby’s hypnosis as an anaesthetic, and the patient had given no
sign of feeling pain. A local paper described him as “a gentleman,
small in stature, . . . with a power of concentration surpassing
anything we have ever witnessed."
It was during this period that Quimby began to
work with a young man named Lucius Burkmar, who was a remarkably
easy subject. Over
several months, he experimented with Lucius, attempting to discover
both the nature and the scope of this new technique. It seemed that Lucius, once
“mesmerized”—that is, in an hypnotic trance—was able to describe
events and conditions that were not visible to those in the waking
state. Initially, as an
entertainment, Quimby would have Lucius tell people about their
past, or the whereabouts and condition of someone or something dear
to them but not in the room.
Then, as people began to ask, Lucius began describing their
illness—often prescribing a “cure.” Soon, Quimby and Lucius were
working with local doctors in the diagnosis and prescription of
cases, with apparently considerable success.
Quimby was curious about these “prescriptions,”
however. Writing in a
Portland, Maine, paper some years later, he said that sometimes
Lucius would prescribe a simple herb that could do no harm or good
in itself, yet the patient recovered. It seemed that any medicine
would have the same effect.
He began to wonder if the recovery were more a function of
the patient’s confidence in the doctor or Lucius than of the
particular treatment prescribed.
The turning point for Quimby appears to have
been an incident when Lucius, under hypnosis, spontaneously began to
describe Quimby’s own recurring pain and its cause. Quimby had a lifetime habit
of pushing himself beyond his physical limits and while the
consumption of his earlier years was no longer a problem, he had
felt, for some time, that his kidneys were failing. The hypnotized Lucius
confirmed this opinion and went further, telling him that one kidney
was half gone and the other was “hanging on by a string.” When
Quimby asked if there was a remedy, the entranced Lucius said, “I
can put the piece on so it will grow, and you will get well,” and
put his hands on Quimby’s back. A day or two later, Lucius
pronounced him well and, wrote Quimby in his manuscripts some 20
years later, “from that day I have never experienced the least pain
from them.”
Quimby was committed to understanding what had
happened. Had Lucius
only “read his mind,” telling him what he, himself, had been
thinking—as Lucius had done so often with others? Was his own
assessment of his condition mistaken? Had Lucius indeed done
something with his hands? Was the trouble only mental in the first
place? Had he simply believed what the doctors had told him—and
experienced increasingly severe symptoms because of their statements
that they knew of no cure?
He began to pay more attention to the diagnoses and cures in
his work. And, after a
number of cases not unlike his own, he began to mistrust doctors
completely, believing that the doctors often created their patients’
disease through their own beliefs, with the outcome determined by
their own faith in their prescriptions and the patients’ capacity
for healing.
As he worked with Lucius, Quimby became aware
that, under hypnosis, the young man would often act before Quimby
actually stated what he wanted. In fact, after a few
experiments, Quimby began to regularly direct Lucius by
concentrating on what he wanted—going so far as to cause him to
laugh by thinking of an amusing situation, or express fear by
vividly imagining a ferocious animal in the room. He reached the point where
anything he could give form to in his mind, Lucius would respond
to. Abstract thoughts,
however, were apparently not grasped—at least not in a way Lucius
could describe when in trance.
These experiences caused Quimby to feel even
more strongly that, in their own way, doctors were often creating
the disease in the patient.
It also caused him to denounce the increasingly popular
Spiritualists—on the grounds that the “medium” could easily be
implanting the experience of spirits in those present just as he
created the experience of a wild animal in Lucius’ mind.
Based on all these experiments, Quimby finally
came to believe that all experience is essentially mental—that a
disease is a wrong belief and a cure is the correction of that
belief. His goal from
that time forward was to change the mind of the patient, so that the
undesirable physical condition would no longer be manifested. At that point, he stopped
using mesmerism and focused on reasoning with the people who came to
him, until they substituted a new belief for the old.
For several years he went from town to town
throughout Maine and upper New England working with patients. His
pamphlet read
Dr. P. P. Quimby
would respectfully announce to the citizens of ______ and vicinity, that
he will be at the _________ where he will attend those wishing to
consult him . . .. gives no medicine, and makes no outward
applications . . . tells them their feelings and what they think
is their disease . . . then his explanation is the cure; . .
.
This part of the pamphlet ended with “The Truth is the Cure.”
In 1859, Quimby was working in Portland, Maine
and writing frequent articles in the local paper. They all followed the same
theme: disease is essentially mental.
.
. . an individual is to himself just what he thinks he is, and he
is in his belief sick.
If I believe I am sick, I am sick, for my feelings are my
sickness, and my sickness is my belief in my mind. Therefore all sickness is
in the mind or belief . . .
. . . the body is only the house for the mind to dwell
in . . . if your mind has been deceived . . . into some belief,
you have put into it the form of a disease . . . By my theory or
truth, I come into contact . . . and restore you to health and
happiness. This
I do partly mentally, and partly by talking till I correct
the wrong impression and establish the
Truth . .
.
. . . Dr Quimby,
with his clairvoyant faculty, gets knowledge in regard to the
phenomena, which does not come through his natural senses, and by
explaining it to the patient gives another direction to the mind
and the explanation is the science or the
cure.
Based on his letters and notes, Quimby’s method
appears to be simple.
He sat down next to a patient, allowed himself to become
completely passive and focused on the patient’s feelings. He then reported to the
patient what he understood about them and explained to them the
error of their belief, impressing on them his own belief concerning
their true condition—health and strength. Over time—sometimes
several sessions—patients would begin to accept Quimby’s statements
in place of their previous beliefs, and their body no longer
displayed the unwanted symptoms. Only if the patient required
some physical action to accept his explanation did Quimby touch them
or recommend an activity.
Over the years, Quimby’s patients numbered in
the thousands—his notes indicate that he sat with 12,000 people
while in Portland, some of them many times before they were free of
symptoms. Among his
successes were Julius Dresser, a Harvard Ph.D. and Swedenborgian
minister whose son later edited and published Quimby’s notes and
manuscripts, Mary Baker Patterson, who later became Mary Baker
Eddy, and Warren Felt Evans, the first major writer to
define the New Thought movement.
He also worked with people through the exchange
of letters. (Since his work with mesmerism and Lucius had shown him
that time and space were not relevant to the mind, he had no problem
accepting the efficacy of such absent treatments.) He would write to
them what he perceived about them as he held their letter of request
and persuade them to accept a different understanding of their
condition, often describing himself as being present with them
through the medium of the letter. Usually, he would encourage
them to find a comfortable place and read his letter several times a
day for several days.
Among the conditions he listed in his
manuscripts as having cured are cancer, lameness, back pain,
consumption, heart disease, fever, small pox, cold, brain fever,
lung fever, neuralgia, and diphtheria. Although smallpox was
recognized by the medical establishment as an infection, with
vaccination was an accepted cure, Quimby was consistent in his
approach declaring it “a superstitious idea . . . Their diseases are
the effect of the community . . .. In ignorance of causes people are
satisfied with someone’s belief . . . Small-pox is a lie . . . ”
While having developed his approach through
hypothesis and experiment and having carefully separated his healing
activities from any religious dogma, Quimby nonetheless felt there
was a spiritual explanation for his process. The editor of his Manuscripts, Horatio
Dresser, noted that at least half of Quimby’s notes were filled with
references to religious problems and the Bible. In part, that was because
Quimby had found that many of his patients’ conditions were the
result of fears and beliefs bound up with religious creeds and
experiences. And, in
part, Quimby was himself, attempting to reconcile his experience
with the faith in which he was raised. In apparent drafts of
articles he wrote:
God made everything
good, and if there is anything wrong it is the effect of ourselves
. . .
. . . there is no
intelligence, no power or action in matter itself . . . the
spiritual world to which our eyes are closed by ignorance or
unbelief is the real world, . . . in it lie all the causes for
every effect visible in the natural world…
. .
. truth which shall set men free must explain both disease and sin
. . . the cure of both was Wisdom, which relates not alone to the
life of the flesh, but also to the life within.
. . . man’s
happiness is in his belief, and his misery is the effect of his
belief . . . Establish this and man rises to a higher state of
wisdom, not of this world. . . all human misery can be corrected
by this principle . . . The sting of ignorance is death. But the
Wisdom of Science is Life eternal . . . .
All the religion I
acknowledge is God, or Wisdom, I will not take man’s belief to
guide my barque [boat].
I would rather stand at the helm myself.
. . . every man is
part of God, just so far as he is Wisdom . . . what we call man is
not man, but a shadow of error. Wisdom is the true man, and error
the counterfeit.
In all these statements, he seems to echo the
spiritual ideas of the Transcendentalists, though there’s no
evidence that he encountered them. That group of Unitarians in
Massachusetts, led by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and
Walt Whitman, were defining a new American ideology. And, in fact, one historian
of the period has said, “Dr. Quimby may be called the scientist of
Transcendentalism because he demonstrated visibly on human organisms
the operational validity of Emerson’s hypotheses”.
Quimby stated clearly that he believed he was
doing what Jesus had tried to teach the disciples to do, but which
teachings had not been passed on in the Church. He believed that Jesus knew
that illness and death were a function of our individual and
collective beliefs and both demonstrated and tried to teach that
Wisdom.
You ask if my
practice belongs to any known Science. My answer is No, it
belongs to Wisdom that is above man as man. The Science I try to
practice is the Science that was taught eighteen hundred years
ago, and has never had a place in the hearts of man since . .
.
He believed that false understandings of the
Bible were the cause of half the diseases from which his patients
suffered. “So to cure,
I have to show by the Bible that they have been made to believe a
wrong construction.”
His interpretations were often allegorical: He would say that
Jesus’ calling of the disciples, for example, caused them to abandon
their nets—that is, old beliefs—and their ships—error—and follow
Him—Wisdom.
P.P. Quimby died in 1866. His body, weakened by
overwork and lack of rest, gave in to a serious illness when he was
64 years old. His
family believed that had he been willing to limit his work, even to
take some time off, he would have continued to ward off disease as
he had for the preceding 30 years. His son George kept his
notes and manuscripts and passed them on to the Dresser family for
editing and publication—which was finally accomplished in 1921.
Reflecting on Quimby’s philosophy in his own
book, Health and the Inner
Life, Dresser stated:
According to Mr.
Quimby, it was the natural man whose life is moulded by belief. The moral of
Mr. Quimby's discovery is not self-affirmation but the profoundest
self-understanding. Man has long tended to circulate about his own
little collection of beliefs. To free him from that bondage, Mr.
Quimby directed man's attention to his true self. Now that true
self is not mental but spiritual. It is as a son of God that one
should go forth to practice the new principles, not as an agent of
mere thought.
Far more important
than the discovery that man is susceptible to manifold hidden
influences and tends to build his own little world of beliefs from
within, is the fact that man is recipient of a higher wisdom and
superior power. The discovery of these subtle influences enabled
Mr. Quimby to explain disease to his own satisfaction, but this
knowledge was not sufficient to produce the remarkable cures
without which Mr. Quimby would never have been heard of . .
..
That man is
spiritual and possesses spiritual senses is of far more
consequence than the proposition that "mind is spiritual matter."
That the spiritual man can become open to and use spiritual power
is of more consequence still; . . .
Therefore [1] the
fundamental consideration for Mr. Quimby was the existence of the
omnipresent Wisdom, the God of peace and goodness, who created man
to be sound and sane. [2] The second great principle was that of
the Christ within, or the principle of divine sonship . . . . each
of us is to discover the true God within our own
consciousness.
