● ● ● to be believed, the individual soul was virtually annihilated, and all that is sweet and pure in our present life debased.31
Quimby might strain toward the clear gray light of Hawthorne’s moral vision, but his power remained rooted in something closer to the strange, nocturnal, pseudoscientific world of Edgar Allan Poe.
When Daniel Patterson in 1861 first wrote Quimby about his wife’s ailments, he had received one of the Portland healer’s circulars. It started off by announcing where Quimby could be consulted, then went on to say:
He gives no medicines and makes no outward applications, but simply sits down by the patients, tells them their feelings and what they think is their disease. If the patients admit that he tells them their feelings, &c., then his explanation is the cure; and, if he succeeds in correcting their error, he changes the fluids of the system and establishes the truth, or health. The Truth is the Cure.32
There was nothing in the circular to show Quimby’s background of animal magnetism, but much to arrest the attention of a searcher for health—and for truth—whose thinking had been gradually leading ● ● ●
31 [Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, a Romance (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1851), p. 32; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1852), pp. 231–232.]
32 Horatio W. Dresser, Quimby Manuscripts, pp. 150–151. While “The Truth is the Cure” might suggest the biblical words, “ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32), the explanation or “truth” which Quimby gave to his patients was often on a markedly unbiblical level, as when he wrote a patient in 1861:
You know I told you about your stooping over: this stooping is caused by excitement affecting the head. This contracts the stomach, causes an irritation, sending the heat to the head. This heat excites the glands about the nose, it runs down the throat and this is all there is about it. It will affect you sometimes when you are a little excited, and you will take it for a cold.
Remember how I explained to you about standing straight. Just put your hands on your hips, then bend forward and back.
This relaxes the muscles around the waist at the pit of the stomach. This takes away the pressure from the nerves of the stomach and allays the irritation. Now follow this and sit down and I will work upon your stomach two or three times in three or four days. (p. 120)