In his earlier book Evans had said of the force of suggestion, with its frequent accompaniment of physical manipulation, “Here is a power that can be turned to good account, or perverted to evil.”101 In Mental Medicine, on the other hand, he argued that this sort of suggestion could be exercised effectively only by those who used it with the highest motives. Not all advocates of animal magnetism would have agreed with this. One such advocate, writing in 1874, warned that the dangers of mesmerism came from the fact that it deprived “the subject of his free will, of his autonomy, that the latter is solely at the mercy of the operator.”102
Mrs. Glover, after further investigation, came to agree that this was so as long as the subject was unaware that he was being controlled by suggestion. In the lexicon of Christian Science animal magnetism would become synonymous with the operations of the carnal or mortal mind, however well-intended its use. Truth—mathematical truth, for instance—might be taught, learned, known, but it could hardly be “suggested.”
Like Quimby, Evans had of course maintained from the outset that his magnetic-mental method of cure was the method used by Jesus, and in Mental Medicine he defined magnetism as “the science of the spiritual world.” He linked Jesus with that pagan wonder-worker Apollonius of Tyana and asserted that the wonders of both “are explicable by the known laws of magnetism.” It is then that he makes the sole reference to Quimby to be found in any of his eight books:
Disease being in its root a wrong belief, . . . change that belief, and we cure the disease. . . . The late Dr. Quimby, of Portland, one of the most successful healers of this or any age, embraced this view of the nature of disease, and by a long succession of most remarkable cures, effected by psychopathic remedies, at the same time proved the truth of the theory and the efficiency of that mode of treatment.
101 [W. F. Evans, The Mental-Cure, Illustrating the Influence of the Mind on the Body (Boston: H. H. and T. W. Carter, 1869), p. 273.]
102 Countess C—— de St. Dominique, Animal Magnetism (Mesmerism) and Artificial Somnambulism (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1874), p. 209. The author continues, “Immorality, ignorance, vanity, carelessness on the part of the magnetizer, give rise to the inconveniences which have continually been pointed out in these pages, and which are detrimental alike to the lucidity and to the health of the subject” (p. 213).