Water played a very important role with the magnetizers. Deleuze wrote: “Magnetized water is one of the most powerful and salutary agents that can be employed. . . . It carries the magnetic fluid directly into the stomach, and thence into all the organs.”20 Quimby used it in his practice internally as well as externally. If Dr. Vail of the Hill Water Cure sometimes healed patients just by talking with them, Quimby accompanied his therapeutic conversations with a veritable flood of water. One patient in 1862 wrote: “He gives no medicine. The whole scope of his Materia Medica, would comprehend water, and a pitcher to hold it. The application consists, if the case demands, in an imbibition of this fluid that would put the votaries of Lager to blush.”21
Quimby’s letters to patients frequently tell them to take a tumbler of water and sip it while they read his letter or while he (mentally) rubs the back of their head or the roots of their nose or some other affected part. On occasion he would write them to hold a tumbler of water in one hand and his letter in the other, a request which suggests that he wanted them to think of the letter itself as magnetized. It was a common belief that a letter could be magnetized, rather as an amulet is “blessed.” A knowledge of this superstition is evidenced in a laughing remark in a letter to Augusta Holmes back in 1843, “I will magnetize a letter with ‘Sap Sugar’ and send you.”22
Quimby may not have taken this particular superstition much more seriously than the schoolgirl, but he did not despise anything that would help to concentrate his patient’s attention on him. Such concentration was in itself a form of “magnetism” and it was, he felt, highly desirable. As he frequently wrote, in his sort of healing by suggestion the confidence of the patient in the healer was all-important; hence his repeated verbal and written admonitions to patients to fasten their thoughts on him at the time of treatment and to think of nothing else.
Toward the end of 1857 Quimby moved to the neighboring town of Bangor, where he took rooms at the Hatch House. The Bangor ● ● ●
20 [J. P. F. Deleuze, Practical Instruction in Animal Magnetism, p. 233.]
21 F. L. Town, “Letter from Louisville,” Portland Daily Advertiser, 6 March 1862, p. 2.
22 Mary Baker to Augusta Holmes Swasey, 24 February 1843, L02682, p. 3, MBEL. [Publisher’s note: The first edition attributes this to a school friend; subsequent research confirms that the author is Mary Baker.]