“Having become deeply interested in the art or science of mesmerism, then in its comparative infancy in this country, he devoted the last twenty years of his life to the development of its principles, especially with reference to the healing art.”¹⁶

Again a tribute to him in the Belfast Republican Journal on May 5, 1887, included a tell-tale phrase: “The good that he accomplished, the suffering that he averted, crippled forms that were restored under his kind, magnetic hand cannot be told in this simple tribute to his pleasant memory.”¹⁷ The “kind, magnetic hand” was what most people remembered, not the strange theories with which he attempted to “explain” their disease to them. This is equally true of the years after he left Belfast, as a number of affidavits and written reminiscences make plain.¹⁸

Many of his patients remembered particularly the burning sensation which seemed to come from his hands as he manipulated them. When questioned about it, he habitually answered that he thought it was electricity passing from him to them. The phenomenon was a common one, according to the manuals of animal magnetism then current—and also according to the reports given today by many who experience the “laying on of hands.” Following the usual practice of that time, Quimby dipped his hands frequently in water. As the Reverend Jacob Baker wrote in Human Magnetism, quoting Deleuze, “If the magnetizer perceives a burning sensation in his hands, he can from time to time moisten them in acidulated water.”¹⁹