● ● ● preceding October, according to one account, he found himself unable to throw off the pain as he had always done previously.175 Toward the end he yielded to the entreaties of his family and received medical treatment, but without avail. The end came on January 16, 1866.
To Mrs. Patterson it seemed that she was now entirely alone. All the generosity of her feeling for Quimby, all the spiritual ideals with which she had endowed his questing, prophetic little figure, welled up in a poem which she wrote on January 22 and called “Lines on the decease of Dr. P. P. QUIMBY, who healed with the truth that Christ taught, in contradistinction to all isms.” Ask her not, she said,
To mourn him less! To mourn him more were just,
If to his memory ’t were a tribute given
For every solemn, sacred, earnest trust
Delivered to us ere he rose to heaven.
Heaven but the happiness of that calm soul,
Growing in stature to the throne of God;
Rest should reward him who hath made us whole,
Seeking, though tremblers, where his footsteps trod.176
In the perspective of time there is a strange irony in the lines. For all the sincerity of her grief, the writer could not know that within a fortnight her own footsteps, very literally “trembling,” would lead her into a world utterly beyond the clairvoyant gaze and inquiring mind of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby.
175 Jane T. Clark, affidavit, 22 January 1907, P. P. Quimby - Affidavits, Etc. - Austin To Mullen, MBEL. Mrs. Clark writes that after treating her husband
Mr. Quimby would go out to his barn, or garden, and work off the pain and disease from his own body, claiming that the treatment drew the disease from the patient into himself.
After a few days Mr. Quimby told us that he was having a new experience in that he had found it impossible to rid himself of the discomfort and pain taken from Mr. Clark.
176 Mary M. Patterson, “Lines on the decease of Dr. P. P. QUIMBY,” Lynn Reporter, 14 February 1866, p. 3.
↑