Health and the Inner Life

Horatio Dresser wrote about healing and Quimby in his 1906 book Health and the Inner Life

It was by restoring himself to health that P. P. Quimby, the parent mental healer in this country, discovered the central principles of the whole doctrine. The first mental-healing author, W. F. Evans, was a patient of Mr. Quimby before he began to write upon the subject. The same is true of the author of Science and Health.

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As contrasted with later forms of mental-healing theory, the tendency of the parent doctrine is to place emphasis upon understanding, rather than upon denial and affirmation. Mr. Quimby sought above all else to discover man's actual situation in life, then to see the wisdom of that situation. He made no attempt to deny the existence of the natural world, but sought its meaning in relation to the spiritual. Nor did he ignore the physical conditions of disease, well knowing that they are decidedly real to the person who is subject to them. His intereist was to penetrate beneath the surface to the interior mental and spiritual causes. Any fact that might throw light on the inner conditions was to be welcomed. Hence the tendency of his thought was not to exclude but to analyse and to master, not to deny but to explain. Mr. Quimby was eager to follow the truth wherever it might lead, firm in the conviction that when discovered it would set man free. His own experience and insight had brought into view a more interior series of facts. On these he believed it possible to rear a truer science and art of life. It is this scientific interest, together with the profounder spiritual principles which it implies, which has been lost sight of during the reign of recent forms of mind-cure teaching. Were it not for this deeper interest many devotees of the movement would have had no connection with it. To approach the subject in this spirit is to put the whole teaching in a different light, to see that it is essentially rational, after all. At the same time one sees why the dozen or more variations have developed from the original  teaching by putting emphasis on certain favourite considerations.

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After a time Mr. Quimby became convinced that whenever the subject examined a patient his diagnosis of the case would be identical with what either the patient himself or some one present believed, instead of Lucius really looking into the patient, and giving the true condition of the organs; in fact, that he was reading the opinion in the mind of some one, rather than stating a truth acquired by himself.

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Becoming firmly satisfied that this was the case, and having seen how one mind could influence another, and how much there was that had always been considered as true, but was merely some one's opinion, Mr. Quimby gave up his subject, Lucius, and began the developing of what is now known as mental healing, or curing disease through the mind. In accomplishing this he spent years of his life fighting the battle alone and labouring with an energy and steadiness of purpose that shortened it many years.

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While engaged in his mesmeric experiments, Mr. Quimby became more and more convinced that disease was an error of the mind, and not a real thing; and in this he was misunderstood by others, and accused of attributing the sickness of the patient to the imagination, which was the reverse of the fact. No one believed less in the imagination than he. "If a man feels a pain, he knows he feels it, and there is no imagination about it," he used to say.

 But the fact that the pain might be a state of the mind, while apparent in the body, he did believe. As one can suffer in a dream all that it is possible to suffer in a waking state, so Mr. Quimby averred that the same condition of mind might operate on the body in the form of disease, and still be no more of a reality than was the dream.

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As the truths of his discovery began to develop and grow in him, just in the same proportion did he begin to lose faith in the efficacy of mesmerism as a remedial agent in the cure of the sick; and after a few years he discarded it altogether. Instead of putting the patient into a mesmeric sleep, Mr. Quimby would sit by him; and, after giving him a detailed account of what his troubles were, he would simply converse with him, and explain the causes of the troubles, and thus change the mind of the patient, and disabuse it of its errors and establish the truth in its place; which, if done, was the cure. He sometimes, in cases of lameness and sprains, manipulated the limbs of the patient, and often rubbed the head with his hands, wetting them with water. He said it was so hard for the patient to believe that his mere talk with him produced the cure, that he did this rubbing simply that the patient would have more confidence in him ; but he always insisted that he possessed no _power_' or healing properties different from any one else, and that his manipulations conferred no beneficial effect upon the patient, although it was often the case that the patient himself thought they did. On the contrary, Mr. Quimby always denied emphatically that he used any mesmeric or mediumistic power.

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He was always in his normal condition when engaged with his patient. He never went into a trance, and was a strong disbeliever in spiritualism, as understood by that name. He claimed that his only power consisted in his wisdom, in his understanding of the patient's case, and his ability to explain away the error and establish the truth, or health, in its place. Very frequently the patient could not tell how he was cured ; but it did not follow that Mr. Quimby himself was ignorant of the manner in which he performed the cure.

"Suppose a person should read an account of a railroad accident, and see, in the list of killed, a son. The shock on the mind would cause a deep feeling of sorrow on the part of the parent, and possibly a severe sickness, not only mental, but physical. Now, what is the condition of the patient? Does he imagine his trouble? Is it not real? Is his body not affected, his pulse quick; and has he not all the symptoms of a sick person, and is he not really sick? Suppose you can go and say to him  that you were on the train, and saw his son alive and well after the accident, and prove to him that the report of his death was a mistake. What follows? Why, the patient's mind undergoes a change immediately, and he is no longer sick."

It was on this principle that Mr. Quimby treated the sick. He claimed that 'mind was spiritual matter, and could be changed' ; that we were made up of truth and error; that disease was an error, or belief, and that the truth was the cure. And upon these premises he based all his reasoning, and laid the foundation of what he asserted to be the _science of curing the sick_ without other remedial agencies than the mind.

Health and the Inner Life: 

An Analytical and Historical Study of Spiritual Healing Theories, with an Account of the Life and Teachings of P. P. Quimby

BY HORATIO W. DRESSER

(1906)

I read this book this morning. This afternoon I was alerted to the work of "John of God". Quimby Hopkins and ACIM all agree that the mind must be healed. HOW, you get that healing whether with external agents or the help of someone is up to your belief system. Both Quimby and Hopkins did distant healing.