● ● ● mirth-provoking wit and humor became well nigh uproarious”—but the more somber evidence of the period suggests that such interludes were rare.157 Bright and cheerful she may have been, but the precarious foundations of her domestic life were rapidly giving way.
At the moment, too, there was something larger than personal tragedy to shake the heart. The surrender at Appomattox brought jubilation and a sense of relief to the North, but quick on its heels came the stunning news of Lincoln’s assassination.158 Mrs. Patterson may well have felt that promise and reversal were the order of the day.
The year 1865 was the last of Quimby’s life. Mrs. Patterson visited him again in the early part of April and once more received temporary relief.159 A month later he retired from Portland to his home in Belfast to carry on a less active practice and probably with the hope of getting his chaotic notes into some sort of form for publication.
A writer in the Portland Daily Press on May 17 lauded his twenty-year search for the origin and nature of disease, and for the first time in public referred to his theory explicitly as a science:
By a method entirely novel, and at first sight quite unintelligible, he has been slowly developing what he calls the science of health; that is, as he defines it, a science founded on principles that can be taught and practised, like that of mathematics, and not on opinion or experiments of any kind whatsoever.160
157 M.W. Patterson (sic) [Mary Baker Patterson], “Essex County Good Templars Union at Marblehead,” Lynn Reporter, 3 February 1866, p. 2.
↑
158 Mrs. Patterson's only known reference to this event is in a poem written some months later when she wrote of the “midnight” day when Justice grasped the sword
And on her altar our loved Lincoln’s own
Great willing heart did lay.
Mary Baker Patterson, entry dated 1 January 1866, “To the Old Year, 1895,” poem, A09001, p. 68, MBEL.
159 Daniel Patterson to Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, 24 April 1865, P. P. Quimby Papers, LOC.
↑160 [“Dr. Quimby,” Portland Daily Press, 17 May 1865, p. 2.] Several published statements aid or implied that his system was as exact as any science, but none called it a science.
↑