Quimby was at that time a 36-year-old clockmaker in Belfast, Maine. Though a man of little education, he had a lively mind and a knack for mechanical invention. On becoming interested in the new “science,” he discovered that he himself possessed great mesmeric power. Before long he had found a young man by the name of Lucius Burkmar, who proved to be the perfect subject for his experiments. Together they traveled through Maine and New Brunswick giving exhibitions of Quimby’s magnetic power and of Burkmar’s clairvoyant skill while in the magnetized state—or, in more modern phrase, under deep hypnosis.
It was common for such traveling pairs to perform feats of mind reading, with the result that in many cases the magnetizer’s “subject” or “somnambulist” came to be referred to as the “clairvoyant.” A particularly popular practice was to have the magnetized subject diagnose diseases and in some cases prescribe remedies. Quimby and Burkmar did this until gradually it was borne in on Quimby that Burkmar was simply describing what the patient or Quimby himself believed was wrong. At the same time he began to realize that any medicine would cure if Burkmar ordered it. “This led me,” Quimby wrote in later years, “to . . . arrive at the stand I now take; that the cure is not in the medicine, but in the confidence of the doctor or medium.”3
The next development in Quimby’s thought is best described in his own words:
I then became a medium myself, but not like my subject. I retained my own consciousness and at the same time took the feelings of my patient. Thus I was able to unlock the secret which has been a mystery for ages to mankind. I found that I had the power of not only feeling their aches and pains, but the state of their mind. I discovered that ideas took form and the patient was affected just according to the impression contained in the idea. For example, if a person lost a friend at sea the shock upon their nervous system would disturb the fluids of their body and create around them a vapor, and in that are all their ideas, right or wrong. This vapor or fluid contains the identity of the person.4
3 P. P. Quimby, Portland Daily Advertiser, 17 February 1862, p. 1.
4 Horatio W. Dresser, ed., The Quimby Manuscripts: Showing the Discovery of Spiritual Healing and the Origin of Christian Science (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1921), p. 78.