Phineas Parkhurst Quimby

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.

Quimby wrote constantly and printed nothing. He left something like ten thousand manuscript pages, kept in the family after his death in 1866, and they did not reach the public until Horatio Dresser edited a selection in 1921. By then New Thought was a movement with congregations, schools and a literature, none of which had been able to read him.

That gap is the whole of the argument about his importance. His patients carried his ideas outward: Warren Felt Evans, a Swedenborgian minister he treated, published books on mental healing from 1869 and was for a time the movement's main theorist; Julius and Annetta Dresser preached his method publicly from the 1880s; and Mary Baker Eddy, treated by him in 1862, went on to found Christian Science. Each of them reworked what they had received, and none of them was working from a text.

The atlas therefore records him as precursor rather than founder, and holds the founding relation to New Thought as debated. A movement with no central authority, no single scripture and several simultaneous origins does not have a founder in the ordinary sense, and every account that gives it one is making an argument about descent that somebody else disputes. What is not disputed is that the people who built it had all, directly or at one remove, been through his consulting room.