Quimby was a clockmaker in Belfast, Maine, with a talent for mechanism and almost no schooling, when a travelling lecturer demonstrated mesmerism in the town in the late 1830s. He took it up, found a young man named Lucius Burkmar who was an unusually good subject, and toured with him. Burkmar, in trance, would diagnose the illnesses of members of the audience and prescribe remedies, and the remedies worked often enough to keep the show on the road.
The turn came when Quimby began to doubt his own act. Burkmar's diagnoses, he noticed, tended to match what the patient already feared, and the prescriptions were frequently worthless in themselves, yet people recovered. He concluded that neither the trance nor the medicine was doing anything: the patient's belief was doing all of it. From about 1847 he dropped the mesmeric apparatus and worked by conversation, sitting with the patient and arguing them out of the conviction that had made them ill.
His theory, so far as he had one, treated disease as an error, planted often enough by the medical profession itself, whose diagnoses he regarded as a kind of hostile suggestion. Health was the natural state, and what he offered was not a cure but the correction of a false belief. He called the method, at various times, the science of health and the science of the Christ, and he thought he was recovering the method Jesus had used.