In another place she wrote of Quimbyism as the next step beyond homeopathy; yet “here I found not Christianity.” Nevertheless she “lauded his courage in believing that mind made disease and that mind healed disease,” and expressed her gratitude “with my native superfluity of praise.” Yet, she went on to say, she still lacked “the one thing needed,” and her health again declined.91
In Science and Health she would later write:
Erroneous mental practice may seem for a time to benefit the sick, but the recovery is not permanent. . . .
A patient under the influence of mortal mind is healed only by removing the influence on him of this mind, by emptying his thought of the false stimulus and reaction of will-power and filling it with the divine energies of Truth.92
This might well stand as her own final reading of the extraordinary stimulus and reaction that marked her experience during the Quimby years.
While this inner drama went on, the outward events of Mrs. Patterson’s life moved forward. After her apparent recovery in October, 1862, she lingered in Portland for almost three months. Her brother and sister-in-law, who had accompanied her there, returned home quickly, glad that she was better but far from convinced that Quimby was not a quack.93
At Mrs. Hunter’s boardinghouse at that time were Julius Dresser, a newspaperman, and Annetta Seabury, whom he was to marry a year later.94 Both were patients of Quimby’s and leading members of the ● ● ●
93 Mary A. Baker to Irving C. Tomlinson, 20 August 1901, Subject File, Mary Baker Eddy - Family - Bakers - Mary Ann (Cook) Baker, MBEL.
↑94 Dresser’s diary for the late months of 1861 and early months of 1862 has been deposited recently in the library of Boston University. It does not show whether he had already started his newspaper career by October, 1862, but he may very well have done so. Although Dresser had been healed by Quimby in the summer of 1860, it was not until early in 1862 that he came to Portland from Waterville, Maine, in order to learn more of Quimby’s theory. What the diary does show clearly is the inaccuracy of Horatio Dresser’s statement in The Quimby Manuscripts that Julius Dresser “spent his time” after June, 1860, in “conversing with new patients” and explaining Quimby’s theory and methods to inquirers. Horatio W. Dresser, Quimby Manuscripts, p. 11.
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