why Sarah, they are getting inklings of this even in the practice of the M.D.s.”⁹⁸ The Mental-Cure is discussed in Appendix B of this book. Mental Medicine in 1873 shows Evans firmly entrenched in his position.

The book is a virtual hymn of praise to what the author again and again calls “the magnetism of the hands,” though he also adds that “the magnetism of the eye, through which the mind acts or goes forth, is of equal efficiency with that of the hand.”⁹⁹ Quimby of course had used both, though his theory made no mention of them. Meanwhile Evans has been reading James Braid of Manchester and William Gregory of Edinburgh and is able to give a more sophisticated account of the way in which suggestion operates in his own and Quimby’s method of cure.

He was attracted by Gregory’s idea of a “conscious impressible state”—a hypnoidal state in which the subject was not thrown into the hypnotic trance but retained full possession of his senses. Evans himself defined this as a state “in which the will of the operator and the simplest suggestion from him becomes the highest law of his patient’s being.” One’s success in curing a patient depends on one’s skill “in managing and controlling his mind.” Even a “simple suggestion, made in the silent depth of your own consciousness” can change the movements of the stomach, the liver, or the kidneys of a patient.¹⁰⁰

From her observation of Kennedy, Mrs. Glover was to add that this sort of suggestion could also change the patient’s attitude toward his friends, toward her, toward Science itself. All such control of one mind by another is characterized by her as a dangerous counterfeit of Science. Where was God in all this? she asked. Where was the subordination of the human will to the divine? She had formerly assumed that because the so-called mesmeric sleep was not involved in Quimby’s method, or in Kennedy’s practice, neither had any connection with mesmerism or animal magnetism; but if those terms were used as a generic description for mental suggestion or one mind controlling another, then Quimby and Kennedy in their different ways might both be described as mesmerists.