● ● ● the circulation, and restore health. . . . Medicine produces a physical impression on the system, but never heals a disease.12
In all Quimby’s ideas, as they developed, there were confused echoes and variations of the ideas to be found in the vast literature of animal magnetism in his day. His theories have been seriously misinterpreted by writers ignorant of this literature. The same thing is true of his practice. Even after he decided that all disease was caused and could be cured “mentally,” he continued to rely on magnetism to change the patient’s “mind,” i.e., the electro-nervous fluids. Eventually he discovered that it was not necessary to cause the mesmeric trance in order to get control of the patient’s mind; simple suggestion was enough. Sometime in the 1850s he moved out of the stage of overt or recognizable mesmerism and cut down on his use of the word; but he continued to accompany his verbal suggestions with bodily manipulations and to follow stock magnetic practices. So long as he remained in Belfast he was known as a “magnetic doctor.”13
12 Dods, The Philosophy of Electrical Psychology, pp. 82–83, 85. This sort of statement was by no means unique to Dods. Cf. Andrew Jackson Davis commenting on homeopathy in the first volume of The Great Harmonia:
Hahnemann reveals and demonstrates most conclusively the relations, connections, and sympathies, existing between the magnetism of medicines and the magnetism of the organization; he recommends the practitioner to dilute, shake, manipulate, magnetize, and spiritualize, his medicines for the purpose of potentializing and widening the circumference of their influence upon the system; he plainly teaches it is by this process that medicines become penetrative, operative, and remedial; and yet there are but few of his disciples that know or believe anything concerning the magnificent and world-revolutionizing developments of Human Magnetism or spiritual philosophy. Homœopathists comprehend something of the mode by which the magnetism or spirit of the medicine acts upon the magnetism or spirit of the human system; but that spirit can act upon spirit, and develop powers and capabilities in the human soul of which the world has had no previous knowledge, is too inconsistent, they generally think, with all nature, to be for one moment admitted. And yet they profess to believe that the “Homœopathic healing art develops for its purpose the immaterial” (dynamic) virtues of medicinal substances, even in those substances, which, “in a natural or crude state, betrayed not the least medical power upon the human system.”
Andrew Jackson Davis, The Great Harmonia; Being a Philosophical Revelation of the Natural, Spiritual, and Celestial Universe, vol. 1, The Physician (Boston: Benjamin B. Mussey, 1850), pp. 249–250.
↑13 [Martha J. Hinds, affidavit, 19 January 1907, Subject File, P. P. Quimby - Affidavits, Etc. - Austin To Mullen, MBEL.] This runs counter to the Dresser contention several decades later, but the Dressers offered no evidence from the Belfast years to support their position.
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