One Simple Idea (6 page)

By about 1872, Eddy seemed to have left behind any earlier sense of mentorship by Quimby. Although she had once eulogized him as a man “who healed with the truth that Christ taught,” she began working on the text of her own testament and vision, the book that would become known as
Science and Health
. The book laid out Eddy’s philosophy that the healings of Christ were not a onetime miracle but an “ever-operative divine Principle” available to modern people. Quimby, to her mind, was, at most, a way station in her journey of discovery, but he was not a teacher. Although Eddy later wrote that she “loved … his high and noble character,” she found that the philosophy she called
Quimbyism
“was too short, and would not answer the cry of the human heart for succor, for real aid”; hence, “I went, being driven there by my extremity, to the Bible, and there I discovered Christian Science.”

In the years ahead, Eddy saw herself—and her followers saw her—as an inspired religious leader. As such, she wanted no association with what she saw as the Mesmeric-influenced outlook of “Quimbyism.” Nor did she want any part of the “New Age” movement anticipated by Evans,
^*2
with its affirmations, inducements to right-thinking, and openness to a plethora of spiritual influences. In a letter to a friend on July 11, 1871, Eddy dismissed Evans, whom she seemed to know only in passing from her Quimby years, as a “half scientist.” This marked a decisive split between Christian Science and the developing movements of alternative spirituality.

Following the publication of
Science and Health
in 1875, Eddy’s ideas quickly gained popularity. Her prayer therapy treatments, which she taught in
classes and wrote about in pamphlets and articles, had deep appeal to a nation suffering under the lingering grotesqueries of “heroic medicine.” Yet Eddy’s success as a new religious voice, and her decisive break with the memory of Quimby, attracted an unwanted figure from the past: a man with an impassioned and newfound sense of ire toward Eddy.

In May 1882, former Quimby patient Julius Dresser, who had expressed little interest in Quimby’s ideas in 1866, and showed less still in Eddy, reemerged on the Boston scene. It is difficult to understand precisely why Dresser left his newspaper job in Oakland, California, and uprooted his wife, Annetta, and family, now grown to three sons, to reappear in the New England mind-cure milieu that year. According to Dresser’s supporters, Julius arrived to stand up for Quimby’s reputation; he believed that Eddy was now passing off the doctor’s ideas as her own, giving her former mentor no credit. Eddy partisans have a different account, which places Dresser back in the Boston area to assume his place, financially and otherwise, in the prospering cultures of Christian Science and mind-cure, which had grown in tandem since the appearance of Eddy’s
Science and Health
. Indeed, Dresser’s motives may have been an amalgam of idealism and self-interest. Whatever the case, it was not until Eddy began to gain national attention that Dresser reawakened to his interest in Quimby.

Resituated in Boston, Dresser partnered with a disputatious ex-student of Christian Science, Edward J. Arens, who had pirated some of Eddy’s writings in his own booklets. Arens gave Dresser some old letters and articles of Eddy’s, in which she pledged fealty to Quimby, and which would later serve as a source of embarrassment to her. Dresser, by his turn, provided Arens with a potted (and ultimately unsuccessful) legal defense for his pilfering of Eddy’s writings, which sought to identify the deceased Quimby, and not Eddy, as the source of the innovative healing ideas.

The Dresser-Eddy feud went public in early 1883. In the
Boston Post
, Julius Dresser and Mary Baker Eddy, each former patients of Quimby, commenced a series of dueling letters in which they first circled one
another like sharks, each subtly, even inscrutably, feinting rushes at the other before charging into an all-out attack.

Their correspondence began in February under assumed initials—Dresser was “A.O.” and Eddy was “E.G.” Dresser threw the first stone, intimating in a letter of February 8, 1883, that it had reached his attention that “some parties healing through a mental method”—he meant Eddy—“did, in reality, obtain their first thoughts of this truth from Dr. Quimby.”

Eddy attempted to respond to his stone with a boulder, writing on February 19—under the initials “E.G.”—that Quimby had been little more than a stage performer, with no clearly enunciated method; his writings mere “scribblings,” she wrote, and Quimby had only a slapdash, Mesmeric method of healing the sick. In the next letter, of February 24, Dresser, now using his real name, played his hand. In a move that must have made Eddy seethe, Dresser aired her private letter to him of winter 1866, in which she had begged Dresser to step forward as her new healer after Quimby’s death. Dresser quoted Eddy, writing at what had probably been the most vulnerable moment of her life, saying that she was frightened and now “find myself the helpless cripple I was before I saw Dr. Quimby.” For a woman now at the helm of a growing religious movement it was a humiliating revelation.

Using her real name, Eddy replied on March 9 in a letter that assumed a more officious and careful tone. Of Quimby’s memory, she wrote: “He was a humanitarian, but a very unlearned man; he never published a work in his life, was not a lecturer or teacher. He was somewhat of a remarkable healer, and at the time we knew him he was known as a mesmerist.… We have no doubt that Dr. Q’s motives were good, for we understood him to be a moral man.” Of greater concern to Eddy was the airing of the “private letter which the gentleman”—after which she added “(?)”—“Mr. Dresser, has on exhibition.”

The chill between the two former Quimby patients was permanently set.

By early 1887, Dresser opened a second front. In February, he issued his most effective polemic against Eddy in a popular Boston lecture, which was quickly issued as a pamphlet called
The True History of Mental Science
. Dresser’s contentions came to shape how the history of positive thinking has been written and understood, including to the present day. The skillful broadside argued that Eddy had lifted her ideas from Quimby during the time she had his confidence as a patient, and that she was now passing them off as her own without crediting the Maine healer. Dresser singled out Warren Felt Evans for high praise, holding him up as an example of a man who, unlike Eddy, knew how to give proper credit to his old mentor.

Yet Evans himself had actually made no mention of Quimby in his groundbreaking 1869 book,
The Mental Cure
.
^*3
Over the course of Evans’s six works on mental therapeutics, written between 1869 and 1886, he made just one reference to Quimby, in his second book on the topic,
Mental Medicine
, in 1872.

No sooner did Dresser’s pamphlet conclude its praise of Evans than it intoned more darkly: “Amongst those who were friends as well as patients of Quimby during the years from 1860 to 1865, and who paid high tributes to his discoveries of truth, and the consequent good to many people and to the world, was one who, for some strange reason, afterwards changed and followed a different course.” Juxtaposing the good son, Evans, to the thankless offspring, Eddy, Dresser thus began his critique of the Christian Science founder, airing her past statements of praise for Quimby, noting her time spent with him, and finally concluding: “It is now easy to see just when and just where she ‘discovered Christian science.’ ”

Arguments tend to coarsen rather than lighten over time. And the
argument that Dresser embarked upon later solidified into a conviction about Eddy, one that got repeated to me this way by a librarian at a metaphysical center in 2012: “She stole all her ideas from Quimby!”

That, in lesser or greater terms, is the judgment many historical writers settled on in the Eddy-Quimby affair, with Evans often cast in a role that he never conceived for himself: the loyal scribe who owned up to his debt to Quimby, versus the less-forthcoming Eddy. In the heat of responding to the charges, Eddy worsened matters by dismissing Quimby’s writing as “scribblings” and calling him “illiterate” in the
Christian Science Journal
in June 1887. In a term that would assume a life of its own, Eddy described Quimby in a letter in 1886 as an “ignorant Mesmerist.”

Yet Eddy’s attitude could also markedly soften. In the late 1880s, Eddy issued a series of autobiographical pamphlets on the development of Christian Science. With each successive revision, between 1885 and 1890, she grew fonder in her tone toward Quimby. In 1885, Eddy called her former teacher a “distinguished mesmerist” and a “sensible old gentleman with some advanced views on healing.” By 1890, Eddy was referring to Quimby as “a humane, honest, and distinguished mesmerist.… He helped many sick people who returned home in apparently good health.”

For Quimby’s partisans, those branches were considered too small in spirit, and the continued reference to Quimby as a “mesmerist” was considered a tendentious and inaccurate characterization. After Julius Dresser died in 1893, his eldest son, Horatio, became a brilliant and prolific critic and historian of the New Thought movement. In 1902 Horatio began graduate studies at Harvard and became something of a protégé to William James, under whose tutelage he earned a Ph.D. in philosophy. Horatio also took up his father’s crusade against Eddy. In a series of handwritten letters, the budding philosopher issued a challenge to Eddy. In a departure from the measured and erudite tone of most of Horatio’s published works, his letters, at times, assumed an almost menacing quality. In 1900—with the Quimby controversy still boiling—Horatio,
in elegant handwriting on the stationery of his family’s metaphysical magazine,
The Higher Law
, addressed Eddy on February 3:

Around the same time that Horatio wrote to Eddy, he dispatched two letters, on January 15 and on February 3, to Judge Hanna, a high-ranking figure in the Christian Science church. “Books are being prepared,” he warned Hanna in January, “which will inform people, and the Quimby Mss. are being held in reserve as the climax.” The actual contents of the Quimby manuscripts remained a mystery. Quimby’s son George refused to release his father’s manuscripts. Acting for sometimes inscrutable reasons of his own, George had guarded the manuscripts from view during Eddy’s lifetime, keeping them inside an iron safe, and
at one point even shipping them to relatives in Scotland to avoid the possibility of their being subpoenaed. It was not until years later—after the death of George Quimby loosened his grip on his father’s writings—that the climax Horatio foretold finally arrived.

With the cooperation of George’s widow, Horatio succeeded in 1921 in publishing
The Quimby Manuscripts
, an edited compendium, in which the historian argued—to a good deal of influence—that Quimby alone was the forefather of the mental-healing movement, and the forerunner of Eddy’s ideas. Yet the book settled no controversies. Because Quimby’s manuscripts had been under lock and key for so many years, and given that the collection was composed of edited selections of a vast array of writings, the portions that Dresser published didn’t decisively move the margins of the debate in one direction or another. In some sense the Quimby selections functioned more like a mirror in which either side saw the validation of its own long-held positions.

The book did, however, represent an important piece of scholarship, since prior to it Quimby’s writings were virtually unavailable in any form. With legal wrangling never far away in the Quimby-Eddy debate, Horatio had to revise the book later that year after the Christian Science church objected to his use of some of Eddy’s correspondence to Quimby.

As seen from his handwritten letters, Horatio sometimes seemed to relish playing the part of intellectual cop. Yet Horatio simultaneously wrote with depth and sincerity of feeling, as though he rued the whole mess. Writing to Hanna of his admiration for the mental-healing philosophy and fires of controversy surrounding it, Dresser offered on January 15: “I regret too more than I can say that the movement should have been so hampered. For I love its truth.”

Eddy, too, could blunt the sharpness of her pen and express affection for Quimby in her historical pamphlets. All of the parties seem to have gotten caught up in a debate whose fires raged and engulfed them in ways they had never foreseen.

From the early 1880s to the early 1920s, the Quimby-Eddy debate produced literally hundreds of articles, books, pamphlets, and lectures, and it remains a touchstone in the history of mental healing. Yet the closer one gets to its flames the lesser the differences seem. If either side had moved an inch toward the other—Eddy acknowledging Quimby’s role in preparing her for her later discoveries and the Dressers conceding the distinctiveness of Eddy’s metaphysic—most of the larger points of contention could have been resolved. No really serious observer ever concluded that Eddy plagiarized Quimby, whose writings were sprawling, vast, and unfocused. Nor could any thoughtful person deny that Quimby was anything less than a profound early influence on the onetime anxious and sickly young Eddy, who sought him out at a period of broken marriage, parental death, and a shattered relationship with her only child.