are the effects of false impressions produced by medical men, giving to the people the idea they have spinal disease, or heart or kidney or liver disease, or forty others that I could name, to say nothing of the number of nervous diseases.
Now all of these ideas thrown into the community are like so many foolish fashions which the people are humbugged by. I do not dispute but that any of these diseases may be brought about through the operation of the mind, but I do say if there was no name given to disease, nor its symptoms, there would not be one-tenth of the sickness there is at this day. I have taken people who have been sick with all of the above diseases, as they thought, and by describing their symptoms and state of mind without their telling me what the trouble was, and they have recovered immediately. A person sick is like a person in a strange land, without money or friends. Now there may be some one near by who would be glad to receive such persons, but they are ignorant of them. The sick are not in communication with themselves, nor any one else—they feel as though no person could tell them how they feel.[1]
SPIRITUALISM AND MESMERISM
How does spiritualism differ from mesmerism? The word mesmerism embraces all the phenomena that ever were claimed by any intelligent spiritualists. The spiritualists claim that they get knowledge from the dead through living mediums.
Do not mesmerisers do this? Surely. Then what is the difference? In the ignorance of the people.
I will give some facts which have come under my own observation. When I first commenced mesmerising about sixteen years ago, the most of my experiments were of the following kind: after getting my subject in a mesmerised state I would try some simple experiment, for instance, imagine some person or animal which he would describe. I would then put him in communication with some person of the company, and let that person carry him to some place which he would describe. In these experiments it would often happen that he would get intelligence from some person of whom the company knew nothing. At other times the
- ↑ Dr. Quimby's reference to “the last twelve years,” would indicate that this “piece” was written between 1852 and 1855. It is his first statement concerning his spiritual method.
