[20] What is here said of Quimby is condensed from Dresser's "The Quimby Manuscripts."
Quimby is Led to Define Sickness as Wrong Belief
In his early thirties he was supposed to be dying of consumption and suffered much from excessive medication. He recovered through an emotional crisis but does not seem to have followed out the possible suggestion of his recovery. He turned instead to mesmerism and travelled about with one Lucius Burkmer over whom he had strong hypnotic influence. When hypnotized Burkmer (or Burkman) claimed the power to look as through a window into the bodies of Quimby's patients and discover, often with illuminating detail, their condition; a good many reputed cures followed. The testimonials to these cures and to the strange powers of Burkmer are themselves an arresting testimony to the lengths people go in the face of what they do not understand. "I have good reason to believe that he can discern the internal structure of an animal body and if there be anything morbid or defective therein detect and explain it.... He can go from point to point without passing through intermediate space. He passes from Belfast [Maine] to Washington or from the earth to the moon ... swifter than light, by a single act of volition."[21]
[21] "The Quimby Manuscripts," p. 38.
Quimby had too alert an intelligence to rest content with the merely occult. He came to believe that Burkmer only saw what the patient thought, could do no more than describe the patient's idea of his own state, or else report the "common allopathic belief about the disease in question," and the cure, he was persuaded, was not in the medicine prescribed but in "the confidence of the doctor or medium." (Note that Quimby here associates the cures produced by the medical faculty and his own cures in one sweeping generalization.) What he was really dealing with then was "belief." It might be the belief of the doctor or the patient or the belief of his friends—but sickness was only "belief." This also was a sweeping generalization but it becomes intelligible as we follow the process by which Quimby reached his conclusions and it helps us to understand the significance of Belief as one of the key words of Christian Science. Quimby was led to identify sickness and wrong beliefs through this analysis of mesmeric diagnosis and health and right belief through his own experiences as a healer. He had no training to help him to an understanding of the real facts which lay behind the belief in sickness. He became a skillful diagnostician of states of mind and a healer of such diseases as could be so treated. But he knew, scientifically, no more of what lay behind it all than a ploughman may know of what lies beneath the furrows he turns.
Quimby Develops His Theories
Mrs. Eddy took over the catch-words of his system and its loose assumptions, and a reasonably careful comparison of the Quimby manuscripts and "Science and Health" shows not only Mrs. Eddy's fundamental and never honestly acknowledged and finally categorically denied indebtedness to Quimby, but the confusion which Quimby's rather striking and original philosophy suffered at her hands. Beginning with his persuasion that health and sickness are phases of belief Quimby discarded mesmerism altogether and addressed himself to the minds of his patients. He had doubtless a keen intuitive knowledge of human nature and its morbid fancies and he was dealing generally with neurotic temperaments over which he exercised a strong and helpful power of suggestion. His explanation of disease—that it is a wrong belief—becomes grotesque enough when he comes down to detail. This, for example, is his diagnosis of Bronchitis—"You listen or eat this belief or wisdom [evidently that Bronchitis is real] as you would eat your meals. It sets rather hard upon your stomach; this disturbs the error of your body and a cloud appears in the sky.... The elements of the body of your belief are shaken, earth is lit up by the fire of your error, the heat rises, the heaven or mind grows dark ... the lightning of hot flashes shoot to all parts of the solar system of your belief. At last the winds or chills strike the earth or surface of the body, a cold clammy sensation passes over you. This changes the heat into a sort of watery substance which works its way into the channels and pores to the head and stomach."[22]
[22] "Quimby Manuscripts," p. 118.
This is Quimby at his worst but beneath it is the germ of the method and philosophy which have attained so luxurious a growth—the explaining, that is, of disease in terms of wrong belief. Inevitably in the elaboration of all this Quimby reached out to include religion and theology and even created his own distinctive metaphysics. He distinguished between the mind and spirit; he must of course discover in personality a power superior to fluctuating mental attitudes. He called his system a science since he was trying to reduce it to a system and discover its laws. He found a parallel to what he was doing in the narratives of healing in the Christian Gospels and claimed Christ as the founder of his science.[23]
[23] Ibid., p. 185.