● ● ● Jeffersonian greeted him as “a disciple of ‘Mesmerism,’ a faith and belief which he now scrupulously adheres to,” but added that he refrained from the usual mesmeric manipulations and “gets control of the patient’s mind . . . with no other appliance but the power of his speech.”23
The description is inexact in several particulars, as is shown by the reminiscences of patients who went to him during the two years he practiced in Bangor. The most important of these is a long account by Charles A. Quincy Norton, who was a young medical student there at the time and who accompanied his mother in 1859 when she visited Quimby to have her facial neuralgia treated:
We found about thirty patients in waiting [in the dining room of the Hatch House, which Quimby used as an office between meals]. . . . The patients arranged themselves about the long room, Mr. Quimby directing where each one should sit, and in giving his treatments he passed from one to another. He asked but few questions, but in a loud voice demanded that each patient look him straight in the eye. An assistant followed him about the room holding a large dish of water. In most cases not a question was asked, in some, however, Mr. Quimby would say: “Where is your pain,” in others he would say: “What ails you.” In some cases he would hold the patients hands for a moment, in others he would put his hand on the head. In some, as in my mothers case, he would wet both hands in the water and gently press or stroke the face, neck or head of the person being treated. In a number of incidences [sic] he would say, in a quick, sharp voice: “Get up, walk away! you can walk, walk!,” the patient almost always doing as bid. To one suffering with rheumatism he said: “The pain is going, it is gone!” With a number he arranged for private treatments. . . . All paid an assistant $1.00, as a fee as they passed out of the door.24
23 “A Dumb Lady Restored to Speech!,” Bangor Jeffersonian, 24 November 1857, p. 2.
24 Charles A. Quincy Norton, “Recollections of P. P. Quimby. The Man and his Methods,” n.d., Reminiscence, pp. 1–2, MBEL [bracketed text Peel’s]. Norton in later years became a Christian Scientist, but his account maintains an admirable objectivity. While he scouted the idea that there was any significant relation between Quimby’s theories and Christian Science, he retained his admiration for the character and intellectual adventurousness of the little “doctor.”