never created by God, but has been made by the false opinions which have been given and believed by man, and he contends that disease can be cured by simply explaining to the patient wherein he has been deceived. . . . He says that if he cures at all he knows how he does it, and that all the power he exerts is simply in what he says to the patient, while sitting with him. [This of course involved the silent realization known as a treatment.] . . . The Doctor also contends that if he can cure an individual case . . . he can produce the same effect by addressing himself to many at the same time. He has [the intention] of publishing his ideas at some future time, and also the idea of treating disease publicly, when he feels that the people are ready.
[It will be noticed, that the writers in the above excerpts from the press uniformly speak of the fact that Dr. Quimby practised according to a “new principle,” not by giving medicine or by making any material applications, and not by the use of mesmerism or spiritism. These excerpts have not been selected and published here because they are favorable, but because they are frank statements of Dr. Quimby's practice as it impressed contemporary observers. The newspaper excerpt which shows the least understanding of Quimby's practice is the following from the Bangor Jeffersonian, 1856. This excerpt was republished in “The Philosophy of P. P. Quimby,” 1895. When the writer quoted below uses the term “animal spirit,” he is using his own term, not Quimby's, for this term was not employed by Dr. Quimby. What Quimby taught was that the false ideas and mental imagery causing the disease were directly impressed on the plastic substance of the mind, which included what we now call the subconscious. Quimby did indeed find the soul, (not the “animal spirit,”) partly disconnected from the body in certain extreme cases, when the patient lay at the point of death, and he conversed with the soul, or, as he says in most of his writings, “the scientific man.” The statement quoted below shows that it was difficult for some observers to understand what Quimby meant.]
A gentleman of Belfast, P. P. Quimby, who was remarkably successful as an experimenter in mesmerism some sixteen years ago, and has continued his investigations in psychology, has discovered, and in his daily practice carries out, a new principle in the treatment of disease. . . . His theory is
