Marketplace of the Marvelous (29 page)

By 1865, nearly twelve thousand patients had come to Quimby's Portland, Maine, office for treatment. Most came out of sheer desperation after regular doctors had given up hope of a cure. Patients came for relief of everything from consumption and smallpox to cancer, diphtheria, and nervous ailments. Quimby was skilled at putting people at ease. His interest and compassion astonished his patients, who were unused to doctors listening so intently and seriously, especially to emotional complaints.
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One of the patients to appear on Quimby's doorstep was Mary Patterson, soon to be Mary Baker Eddy, in 1862. Quimby with his patient ear and healing mind worked wonders on Eddy. She was so inspired by his healing process that once well, she resolved to take up a career in Quimby-style mental healing. A few months later, Eddy gave her first public lecture on “P. P. Quimby's Spiritual Science Healing Disease as Opposed to Deism or Rochester-Rapping Spiritualism,” the last a reference to the mysterious and ghostly knockings that inaugurated the spiritualist movement in Rochester, New York. With this talk, she anointed herself Quimby's first spokesperson. Unfortunately for Eddy, her mentor died the next year, on January 16, 1866, temporarily robbing her of her inspiration and role model.
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Two weeks after Quimby's death, though, Eddy discovered the path to her future. After a fall on an icy street left her largely confined to bed, Eddy found sudden relief from her painful injuries while reading passages from the Bible on Christ's healing ministry. The “presence and power of God seemed to flood her whole being” and she stood up “healed.”
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She could not explain what happened, but she knew beyond a doubt that her recovery resulted from her reading of the Gospel. From this experience, she developed a theory based on the premise that disease resulted from one's alienation from God. Like Quimby, she believed that illness existed in the mind; her reading of
the Bible told her that it was not inherent in God's creation. Since “God is good” and “God is all,” Eddy reasoned that evil, a category under which disease naturally fell, therefore could not possibly exist. “Evil is but an illusion,” Eddy counseled, a misbelief that needed to be changed. It was an idea that largely conformed to Quimby's practice. She then took the extreme step of negating the existence of the physical body itself. Eddy argued that God lived in the spirit that existed in the mind, and since God was everything, what people thought of as their physical body was in reality only another misguided belief. In theory, she wrote, “a man could live just as well after his lungs had been removed as before, if he but thought he could.” She named her new approach to healing “Christian Science,” ignoring or perhaps not caring that Quimby had sometimes used that name for his system. She also disavowed any debt to her mentor and claimed only divine revelation, even though her theory appeared to be little more than Quimbyism embellished with biblical references.
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Eddy published her findings in
Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures
in 1875 and four years later, in 1879, founded the Church of Christ (Scientist). The church soon became one of the fastest-growing denominations in the country, counting more than 200,000 members by 1925. Local churches and instructional institutes opened around the country, and several thousand Christian Science healers, more than 80 percent of them women, began practicing.
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Eddy also opened a school, a first for any of the mesmerist and magnetist mind cures in the United States, in 1881. The Massachusetts Metaphysical College graduated hundreds of doctors of Christian Science, who helped spread her message and technique from coast to coast. She'd begun teaching students more than a decade before, in 1868, promising lessons in a method “with a success far beyond any of the present modes.”
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Christian Science boasted an impressive record of cures. Healing “testimonies” appeared as a monthly feature in the
Christian Science Journal
, which launched in 1883. In its pages, people claimed to have been cured of cancer, blindness, and gunshot wounds to the chest. When a stage curtain descended on the head of an operatic prima donna, it delivered a “staggering blow” to her “delicate little nose.” But after a visit with a practitioner of Christian Science, her swollen nose and badly bruised eyes had healed completely.
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Not all believers went
to visit a Christian Science doctor. Some attempted to cure themselves by reading
Science and Health
. One Seattle woman reported that thirty years of constipation cleared up after she read Eddy's book. Another woman in Salt Lake City declared the broken arm she suffered in a bicycle accident healed after ten minutes of reading. Eddy expected patients to try to heal themselves first. This is partly why she put so much work into editing and refining
Science and Health
throughout her life, undertaking eight major revisions and issuing more than four hundred printings.
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Few irregular theories struck regular doctors as more ridiculous than Christian Science, particularly Eddy's denial of the very existence of physical bodies. After Eddy reported saving the life of a pregnant woman and her twelve-pound infant, Chicago physician Edmund Andrews sarcastically remarked that, for having no body, “this bouncing offspring” had produced “a very satisfactory result” for the mother.
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Another case found a Christian Science healer called to attend to a sick cow. Once recovered, the cow chased the doctor around the barnyard until a hired man scared him off with a pitchfork. The story prompted one regular doctor to wonder if the line of “non-existence of matter has to be drawn at enraged animals.”
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American journalist Ambrose Bierce got in on the fun, too, writing in his
Devil's Dictionary
that Christian Science was superior to regular medicine because it “will cure imaginary diseases, and they cannot.”
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Eddy's claim that the death of her husband in 1882 was caused by a mental poison delivered by an enemy mesmerist earned the scorn of the
Cincinnati Daily Gazette
, which claimed that, in fact, he had suffered from arsenic poisoning. “Mrs. Eddy's theory reminds one of the old stories of witchcraft, in which the tormenter made an image of the person he wished to afflict, and by sticking pins into it and otherwise misusing it, caused the live victim to feel pain as if he had been directly attacked,” stated the
Gazette
. “This is the nineteenth century, but the traditions of the seventeenth still survive.”
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An autopsy conducted by Dr. Rufus Noyes concluded that Eddy's husband had died from heart disease, but Eddy refused to believe him, even after Noyes went to the extraordinary length of bringing her his heart on a tray and showing her the diseased parts.
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Harvard physician Richard Cabot was more generous, writing that “most” of the cures claimed by Christian Science were probably true if gauged by the power of suggestion and placebo. Tabulating cures proclaimed
in Christian Science journals, Cabot proposed that at least three-quarters were of psychological rather than physical ailments.
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Many regulars agreed that Christian Science probably worked for hysterics, worriers, and sufferers from “imaginary maladies,” but for serious cases like smallpox and heart disease, they called Christian Science a danger to public health. Some Christian Scientists were accused of murder, but most were acquitted on the grounds that patients were free to express their religious beliefs. To avoid further legal trouble, though, Eddy advised her followers to decline patients seeking help for infectious or contagious diseases as well as seriously ill children.
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Eddy herself also provoked the heated cries of her critics in the religious and medical circles she sought to displace with her own medical-religious system. Clergymen portrayed her as a boa constrictor who had “coiled herself around the Christian system, breaking all the doctrinal bones of Christianity,” while she covered them in slime so they would “go down easy.” Others saw her as a spider attempting to “beguile simple souls into her web” and “devour them.”
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In human form, she was an “enchantress,” cruelly enticing the innocent with “the sweet cup of her sorcery,” before revealing to the ensnared masses that she was “not a beautiful maiden, but an old hag” leading “the sons of men downward to darkness and woe.”
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Clearly, Eddy's gender and not just her theory played a large part in the attacks. Developed and led by a woman, rather than just allowing women to take part, Christian Science posed a unique threat to both regular medicine and traditional religion. Prevailing views held that women who promulgated unorthodox views or who did not fulfill their female duties were insane, unpleasant “mental harridans.” Some declared Christian Science to be little more than the delusions of a hysterical woman. Ralph Wallace Reed asserted that practitioners of “psychological medicine” would “have no difficulty in diagnosing her case” of major hysteria. Widespread stereotypes of women's intellectual inferiority made others declare Eddy simply incapable of reason and scientific inquiry and thus pronounce her system impossible to take seriously, dismissing it as a movement of women, even as it grew into an international phenomenon.
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Despite Eddy's critics, Christian Science only continued to grow and spread among women and men. The large number of men who helped to expand the church and spoke out in its favor belied the
image of Christian Science as an organization of hysterical women. Letters in the
Christian Science Journal
found followers coming to Christian Science primarily for healing but also for a more satisfying understanding of God. Both men and women confessed themselves unable to reconcile themselves to the idea of a God who caused or even allowed so much suffering in traditional religion. Eddy's insistence that God did not cause evil in any form and her advice to have a hopeful state of mind comforted those theologically and medically disillusioned.
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As more people converted, Christian Science Reading Rooms for the study and purchase of books opened around the country and continue to operate to this day. The
Christian Science Monitor
continues to publish national and international news with a daily religious feature. Church members can be found in more than 130 countries.
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Christian Science was not the only mental healing group to emerge after Quimby's death. Two other Quimby patients, Warren Felt Evans and Julius Dresser, along with Dresser's wife, Anetta, interpreted the growing public interest in mental health as a calling, and they set up mental healing practices in Boston. Unlike Eddy, they fully acknowledged their debt to Quimby. With no prior training other than what they had observed from Quimby, Evans and the Dressers continued to clarify and refine their intellectual understanding of mental healing, picking up pieces of nearly every metaphysical idea they happened across, be it Christian, spiritualist, Transcendentalist, Buddhist, Swedenborgian, mystic, or otherwise. Their enthusiasm proved contagious and helped to spread their increasingly popular brands of healing around the country. These and other like-minded thinkers contributed to what became known as the New Thought movement, a loosely organized group that shared a conviction—if little else—that the mind can solve all human problems. “Minds are forces,” they argued, and could be harnessed with proper instruction.
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Publishing a stream of articles and books, New Thought authors attempted to systematically apply the principles of mesmerism and other metaphysical ideas to everyday life. They advised readers to adopt mental habits that duplicated the thinking associated with the mesmeric state of consciousness, in effect taking the “right beliefs” that Quimby sought to place in people's minds and turning them into complete descriptions of how people ought to think and act.
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In practice, this resulted in a flood of surefire mind-cure solutions
to problems in marriage, work, or home life. Books with titles like
Thought Is Power, How to Get What You Want
, and
Making Money
transformed belief in the power of the mind to cure illness into a whole life philosophy largely centered around positive thinking.
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“Within yourself lies the cause of whatever enters your life,” advised Ralph Waldo Trine's 1897
In Tune With the Infinite
, which sold more than two million copies. “To come into the full realization of your awakened interior powers, is to be able to condition your life in exact accord with what you would have it.”
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Frank Channing Haddock offered practical, hygienic advice for “acquiring magnetism” and what he called “success-magnetism” in his
Master of Self for Wealth, Power, and Success
, recommending “scrupulous cleanliness of the body, without and within,” “sweet, sound and early sleep,” and a balance of “work and recreation.”
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These books, many of them best sellers, dramatically increased the number of people who came into contact with American mesmerist ideas of the mind's extraordinary powers to shape one's external circumstances. It also obscured mesmerism's history and original applications.