One Simple Idea (4 page)

For all the enthusiasm of Mesmer’s followers, the practice of Mesmerism faded in France. The revolution in 1789 sent some of Mesmer’s aristocratic students fleeing, and others to the guillotine (a fate met, too, by some of the members of the Franklin commission, including Bailly and
Lavoisier). Puységur spent two years in prison, after which he was able to recover his property and begin some of his research anew. But Mesmerism slipped from the public memory. Séances and magnetic trances were supplanted by political tracts and revolutionary intrigues.

While the influence of Mesmerism dimmed in Europe, the healer’s philosophy—or rather the version reinterpreted by his followers—began crossing the Atlantic. In America, a new generation of Mesmerists migrating from France and England discovered a public hungry for innovation.

In August 1836, Quimby encountered a traveling Mesmerist lecturer in Bangor. A French expatriate named Charles Poyen visited the Maine city on a lecture tour. Poyen himself was a product of the marriage between Mesmerism and French social reform. His dedication to Mesmerism was jointly forged in his opposition to slavery—and his experience of a strange medical episode.

While studying medicine in Paris in 1832, Poyen suffered a digestive disorder and “nervous disease.” After eight months of fruitless treatment the medical student sought out a Mesmerist. His Mesmerist employed an innovative twist on the practice. He placed an assistant, a “Madame V,” into a state of “magnetic sleep” from which the medium astonished Poyen by seeming to clairvoyantly diagnose his illness. “That lady had never seen me before, and very probably did not know even my name,” Poyen wrote. “How much surprised was I, when, after communication had been established between us, I heard her giving a correct and minute description of the symptoms of my disease, as though she experienced it herself …”

Acting on the medium’s advice, Poyen sought to rest his nerves with an extended visit to his family’s sugarcane plantations in the French West Indies. What he witnessed on the islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe transformed his view of life. Some of the island’s slaveholding plantation owners were themselves skilled in Mesmerism, which they demonstrated on their field hands. Poyen was deeply moved to discover that African slaves and French slaveholders both entered trance states and
experienced the same effects. For Poyen, this suggested the basic sameness of human beings. It moved him to revile slavery.

“Those cases were altogether remarkable,” he recalled, “and they enabled me, more than any thing else, to form the opinion that the human soul was gifted with the same primitive and essential faculties, under every climate, among every nation, and under whatever skin, black, red, or white, it may be concealed.”

After Poyen’s fourteen-month stay in the islands, however, his digestive condition was no better. In a somewhat strange choice, he decided to see if the cold winds of New England would prove a better tonic than the tropics. Poyen arrived in Portland, Maine, in late 1834 and in the following year settled in Lowell, Massachusetts. It proved a good match for the young Frenchman. The town was a center of abolitionism and frequently hosted antislavery speakers. Poyen struck up a friendship with Lowell’s mayor, a Brown-educated physician who was intrigued by what Poyen told him about Mesmerism. With the mayor’s encouragement, Poyen embarked on lecture tours to Boston and other parts of New England in 1836 to speak on magnetism’s benefits.

Public speaking did not come easily to Poyen. With a halting command of English, he struggled before audiences. In another difficulty, his face was almost half-covered by a dark red birthmark (leading at least one observer to surmise that the Frenchman was himself a former Afro-Caribbean slave). Poyen contemplated returning to a more “comfortable existence” in the West Indies but found the islands’ slave-based society “repugnant to my sympathies.” He also felt that abandoning his speaking tour would mean allowing Mesmerism to die in America.

Poyen decided to add some drama to his presentations through live demonstrations in which he would place volunteers into trances. This was his practice when he attracted the attention of Quimby during his visit to Bangor in November 1836. Though intrigued, Quimby was hardly overwhelmed. Poyen, Quimby recalled in his notes, “did not appear to be highly blest with the power of magnetising to the satisfaction of his audience.”

Never fully breaking through in America, Poyen resumed his medical studies in Paris in 1841. He planned to make a new tour of the United States in 1844, but he died of unknown causes at Bordeaux just as he was embarking on his return journey.

While Poyen’s reach was limited, he did stimulate Quimby’s interest. And in a few years the clockmaker encountered the work of a more impressive Mesmerist. In fall 1841, a British physician and magnetic healer named Robert H. Collyer made his way to Belfast, Maine. A skilled and persuasive speaker, Collyer attracted large audiences with a style that was far more polished than Poyen’s. The October 1, 1841,
Republican Journal
of Belfast reported on Collyer’s method:

Collyer used on his assistant the same trance method that had been practiced by Mesmer himself. As Quimby witnessed Collyer’s ability to affect the bodily state and sensations of his assistant, he grew more interested in what he felt Mesmerism uncovered: a link between the state of the mind and the experience of the body. The existence of a mind-body connection confirmed the relief he felt during his carriage rides. Quimby began to ponder ways of further testing and using this connection. If the mind impacted the body, he wondered, what other powers might it contain?

Quimby was not a philosopher or a pedant but an experimenter. Although he possessed an extraordinarily sharp mind and a keen grasp of mechanical details, he was unable to write much beyond the level of a schoolhouse boy, a fact that embarrassed him. Quimby did maintain voluminous notebooks, into which he sometimes dictated his ideas with the assistance of others or, more commonly, arranged for friends and helpmates to rewrite his notes. But Quimby’s aims were beyond the printed page. He was in search of a usable, practical method: Quimby wanted to rework the revelations of Mesmerism, in combination with his own personal experiments, and devise a protocol to treat the sick.

Shortly after attending Robert H. Collyer’s 1841 Mesmerist demonstrations in Belfast, Maine, Quimby found a practical way of acting on his ideas. He met a seventeen-year-old boy who, similar to the medium once visited by Charles Poyen, could diagnose diseases from a trance state. Quimby believed that the local boy, Lucius Burkmar, was capable of clairvoyantly peering into the mind and body of subjects.

In fall 1843, Quimby and Lucius were traveling as a team throughout Maine and nearby New Brunswick, Canada, treating the sick, often in the presence of a local physician. Their method was to sit facing each other, knee to knee, while the older man gazed into Lucius’s eyes and gently waved his hands around Lucius’s face, placing him into a clairvoyant trance. This was an almost exact echo of the practice that Quimby had witnessed in Collyer and his young assistant.

From his magnetized state, Lucius attempted to mentally scan the diseased organs of patients and prescribed them folk remedies such as herbal teas. The local physician would often prepare and administer the tea. Other times, Quimby would assist area surgeons by inducing a patient into a state of “mesmeric anesthesia.” Lucius and Quimby’s activities attracted a great deal of attention among New Englanders, and many swore that the pair had relieved their ailments, from migraines to tuberculosis.

But Quimby grew unsatisfied. He found that Lucius’s “cures” were
often no different from those that had been administered previously, and unsuccessfully, by a physician. The only difference seemed to be that the patient was aroused to an experience of relief by the presumed authority of the medium. Quimby grew convinced that it was neither the boy’s clairvoyance, nor his herbal remedies, that were curing people. Rather, it was his ability to awaken hope: “The patient’s disease is in his belief,” Quimby wrote in his notes. And “the cure,” he continued in a letter to the
Portland Daily Advertiser
, “is not in the medicine, but in the confidence of the doctor or medium.”

Quimby had the same insight as Mesmer’s best students, who theorized that the effects of the mind, rather than magnetic fluid, were helping patients. While no communication existed between Quimby and Mesmer’s protégés, each inched toward similar conclusions.

Armed with this insight, Quimby stopped working with the clairvoyant around 1847. He began treating people on his own. Quimby’s method was to sympathetically sit face-to-face with a patient, never denying that the subject was sick but rather encouraging him to “understand how disease originates in the mind and [to] fully believe it.” If the patient’s confidence in this idea was complete, Quimby would then urge the patient to ask: “Why cannot I cure myself?”

Quimby had devised some of the earliest methods of suggestibility. But he didn’t see his work in those terms. Quimby’s vocabulary was grounded not in psychology but in New England religious experimentalism. While Quimby disliked institutional religion (like a true New England freethinker), and would, by turns, speak of “matter”—both ethereal and physical—as an impersonal, mechanistic force, he ultimately came to view the mind and body as subject to scientific spiritual laws. “All science is a part of God,” he wrote in an unpublished manuscript called “Questions and Answers.”

Quimby also believed that all intelligence emanates from a universal source, and forms a continuum of spirit, mind, and matter. Since this inflowing force is perfect, he reasoned, it follows that “false beliefs”—or
ignorance of universal goodness—cause disease or strife. He developed the idea that all of man’s experience is determined by his perceptions. “Our happiness and misery are what follow our belief,” he wrote in his notes.

On rare occasions Quimby referred to man possessing “an unconscious power that is not admitted,” or a “wisdom that is invisible and unconscious,” enunciating a remarkably early psychological insight. Quimby could sound like a medieval alchemist in one breath and a proto-modern psychologist in another; in actuality, he was a bridge between the two.

It is not always easy to understand how Quimby affected his patients. Edwin Reed, who had been the mayor of Bath, Maine, claimed that Quimby had cured him of complete blindness. A young woman who had been unable to speak for four years told the
Portland Daily Advertiser
on April 29, 1862, that Quimby had cured her after two months of treatment. News of Quimby’s mental cure spread so widely that between the mid-1840s and his death in early 1866, he treated about three hundred people a year—amassing literally thousands of followers, many of whom deeply believed in his honesty and decency. “His patients come from the four winds of heaven,” wrote an admirer in the
Portland Daily Advertiser
on February 5, 1862.

Late in his career Quimby was charging five dollars for mental treatments. But records show him accepting considerably less, and sometimes returning the money until a cure manifested. A boyhood neighbor who knew him in Belfast recalled a certain mystique about the man: “He had keen, restless, fascinating black eyes, with which he would look intently at those who sought him for treatment.… He was known widely in the community and was highly regarded and respected. He was known by all to possess peculiar powers and he practiced and exhibited these powers for many years.”

Others were less impressed. Recalling her treatment years earlier, a former patient wrote in 1907:

Quimby’s following was among farmers, housewives, and ordinary people. But his ideas attracted the attention of formidable religious thinkers. One of the most significant was Warren Felt Evans, a New England Methodist minister who left his pulpit in early 1864 to dedicate himself to the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg.

The previous summer, while struggling to combine his Methodist beliefs with Swedenborgian mysticism and his own experiments into mental healing, Evans had sought out Quimby. He was stimulated by the mind-healer’s theories. Followers of Swedenborg often took naturally to Quimby’s methods, which seemed to suggest that the mind was a tool that could channel and direct the cosmic laws Swedenborg had written about. Evans went on to write about mental healing in six books, and he proved an enormous force in shaping the positive-thinking culture.

Open nearly any history of alternative religions or the mental-healing movement and you will encounter the following scenario: Persuaded by Quimby’s approach, and, by some counts, healed through it, the erudite Evans became a disciple of the mind-healer and went on to become Quimby’s chief chronicler and popularizer. This scenario got launched, as will be seen, in a debate over the origins of mental and spiritual healing, waged in the years just before and after Evans’s death in 1889, when the minister was unable to point out the obvious: that Evans regarded Quimby not as a mentor but as a colleague with whom to discuss mutual findings. Indeed, Evans had already worked through his own outlook on mental healing by the time he met Quimby.