Phineas Quimby

The teaching

Taught from his own notes and essays, printed as The Quimby Manuscripts (1921) and The Complete Writings (1988).

The error that makes the sickness

Quimby teaches that disease is an error, a false belief planted in the mind, often by a frightening diagnosis or a fearful word, which the body then acts out, and that the explanation of how the belief arose is itself the cure. That teaching, and the movement that grew from it, are given in the branch on where it comes from, among Imagination and intention. Here is the rest of what is his, in his own terms, with the caution that belongs to it: it is his belief, never a reason to delay or refuse a doctor's care, and an illness is not the fault of the person who has it.

Truth and belief

Man, Quimby writes, is made up of truth and belief. Truth is what he calls wisdom or science: what is so, whatever anyone thinks. Belief is opinion, received from parents, priests, doctors and the talk of the world, and taken for knowledge. Most of the misery of life, in his account, comes from opinions held as truths, and his whole practice is to part the two: to find, under a patient's sickness, the belief that made it, and to show the patient that it was only a belief.

Mind as spiritual matter

His picture of the mind is not the usual one. Mind, he holds, is a kind of spiritual matter, a fine substance that receives impressions and takes shapes as soft clay does. An idea is a shape in that matter, and the body, which follows the mind, takes the shape too: a fear of a wasting disease, held long enough, forms its image first in the mind and then in the flesh. Behind the mind stands the real self, which he calls wisdom or the scientific man, which is not moved by opinions and can see them for what they are.

What the trance taught him

He came to this, as he tells it, through mesmerism. His subject Lucius Burkmar, in the trance, would describe a patient's illness and prescribe a remedy, and patients improved. But the remedies, Quimby saw, did not matter: a cheaper one worked as well when the patient believed in it, and Lucius seemed to read the patient's own belief, or the doctor's, rather than the disease. He concluded that no magnetic fluid was at work, only mind acting on mind, and he put the trance aside.

Sitting with the patient

His method was a conversation. He sat with the patient, often silent at first, and by his own account took on in himself the patient's feelings and pains, so that he could tell them what they felt and how the belief had begun. Then he explained it: who had told them what, when the fear had taken hold, and why it was an opinion and not a fact. He asked for no faith in himself and gave no medicine. When the patient saw the error, he held, the body was free to return to its own health.

Jesus and the Christ

Quimby reads the Gospels in the same light. Jesus was a man; the Christ was the science he taught and practised, the wisdom that knows truth from opinion and heals by explaining. The healings of the Gospels, in his reading, were not miracles but the work of that science, which the churches lost when they turned it into a creed, and which anyone may learn, since it is only the truth about how the mind acts on the body. He called what he practised the science of health and happiness.

The words that frighten

His hardest words are for those who frighten. The doctor who names a disease and foretells its course, in his view, often plants the very belief that makes it, and the preacher of hell and judgement makes the soul sick in the same way. Words are not idle: a sentence spoken with authority to a frightened person can do lasting harm, and the healer's first duty is to undo it. This is his teaching, given as his. A doctor's diagnosis is knowledge to act on with that doctor, and his view of medicine is no guide to anyone's care.