In his last year there, 1857, he healed his brother-in-law, E. C. Hilton, of typhoid fever, and many years later Hilton described the incident in an affidavit:
His first treatment consisted of passing his hands over my chest and stomach which seemed to relieve me. A few days later he took a basin filled with water, sprinkled me with the water and made passes with his hands before my face. He then told me to lift the end of a sofa which I did. Then he requested me to put my arms around him and lift him from the floor, but I refused to do this.14
After describing another healing in which Quimby manipulated his lame knee, Hilton concluded, “I always considered his healing to be through animal magnetism.”
Another witness, Judge Charles K. Miller, of Camden, Maine, told in an affidavit of being taken to Quimby about this same time to be healed of the effects of a severe case of rheumatic fever. Quimby was called to the hotel where the then thirteen-year-old boy had been carried on arriving in Belfast.
He rubbed me and then they put me in a chair. He then looked me straight in the Eye and such eyes I never beheld before told me to get up and walk. I told him I couldn’t. He said you can. He took hold of me and pulled me on my feet and I walked two or three steps and fell but he caught me and I was then put to bed again. The next day I went back home again, and was able to ride on the seat with my parents. . . . I was not treated mentally but by rubbing and through mesmerism.15
Quimby’s fellow townsmen continued to look on him as a practitioner of mesmerism even though he no longer sent them into a mesmeric trance. As the History of Belfast by Joseph Williamson put it:
14 E. C. Hilton, affidavit, 20 February 1907, Subject File, P. P. Quimby - Affidavits, Etc. - Austin To Mullen, MBEL. This is one of many affidavits and written statements gathered mostly by Alfred Farlow between 1899 and 1908.
↑15 Charles K. Miller, affidavit, 25 April 1907, Subject File, P. P. Quimby - Affidavits, Etc. - Austin To Mullen, MBEL.
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