change of feeling is daguerreotyped on the doctor again, and this [new impression] also throws forth a shadow, and he sees the change and continues to treat it in the same way. So the patient's feelings sympathize with his, the shadow grows dim, and finally the light takes its place, and there is nothing left of the disease. [This description refers to the successive intuitions concerning the whole individual, the error to be banished, the fears to be overcome, the haunting mental pictures to be blotted out; and the picturing of the Divine image of health, made concrete by Quimby's great power of focussing the attention, as well as his insight into the causes on which he based the explanation following the silent treatment. The “receptive-plate” of the patient includes part of what we now call the subconscious. When actual changes were wrought the patient began to feel the benefit. Then the process of re-education could be begun. Quimby judged by the ideal or “scientific” man, in contrast with which the patient's own idea of himself as a sick person was a mere shadow.]
TREATMENT OF A CHILD
To show the effect of the will upon the mind of a child, I will state the case of one about two years old who was brought to me to be treated for lameness. The mother held the child in her lap and informed me that it was lame in its knee. This was the information I received from its mother; but when I sat by the child I experienced a queer feeling in the hip and groin, but no bad feelings in the knee. I told the mother that the lameness was in the hip, and that I would show her how the child walked, and how it would walk were it lame in the knee. I then imitated the walk of the child, and also showed how it would walk were the lameness in the knee. After I explained the difference to her the mother admitted I was right.
I then informed her that to cure the child's lameness I must cure her (the mother) of the disease which was in her senses [mind] while the phenomenon was exhibited in the child. She said the doctor told her the disease was in the knee, and ordered it splintered. To splinter up the knee and keep it from bending would be to encourage the evil in the hip, and make a cripple of the child. I was obliged to explain away the doctor's opinion. When I suceeded in doing that, it changed the mother's mind so much that when
