Behind his retirement lay not only a particular illness but also a growing weariness. Not surprisingly, the energetic little man who had poured so much of his energy into his patients was feeling the limits of his power—and perhaps an added frustration. Theoretically, those patients of his who had talked with him at length and studied his notes should be able to practice as he did. Yet not one of them—with the exception of Mrs. Patterson, whom he apparently recognized as acting from some spiritual position beyond his own—seemed able to heal by his method.¹⁶¹

Emma Ware wrote in 1882, “I devoted myself exclusively to his instruction as long as he lived—but I never learned the art of healing,” and the same thing was true of her sister, who suffered from extreme ill health all her life.¹⁶² Julius and Annetta Dresser began healing only in 1882 after they had emerged from obscurity to take a course of instruction with one of Mrs. Eddy’s students, Edward J. Arens, and even then they were never really successful healers. Their son Horatio, Quimby’s most persistent propagandist, wrote in 1910, “One searches his manuscripts in vain for a clear explanation of his method of silent cure.”¹⁶³

The reason is indirectly made clear by a Methodist minister turned Swedenborgian, Warren Felt Evans, who had visited Quimby in 1863. Evans had been practicing healing for several years before that. In an interview published twenty-five years later, he stated that he had called twice briefly on the Portland doctor and satisfied himself that Quimby’s methods were “like those he [Evans] had employed for some years, which was a mental process of changing the patient’s thinking about disease.” The interviewer, A. J. Swarts, added that his own inquiries in Portland confirmed the fact that modern mind cure had “originated with these two men, and that it is difficult to say which practiced it first.”¹⁶⁴