Certain Trumpets by Garry Wills

Author:Garry Wills
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks

Mary Baker Eddy

From Ernest Sutherland Bates and John V. Dittemore, Mary Baker Eddy: The Truth and the Tradition (Knopf, 1932).

ANTITYPE

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby

Those involved with the history of Christian Science tend to be Quimby people or Eddy people. The former think that Eddy stole Quimby’s system and passed it off as her own. The latter think that Quimbyites want to reduce everything Eddy accomplished to one simple act of plagiarism. In fact, the two people were so different that their body of work had to be drastically different in aim and method.

This is not to deny the similarities that exist in their stories. Like most mind-healers of the period, they had begun life sickly and run through inadequate remedies on the way to their own health technique. Quimby (born in 1802) was, for the first four decades of his life, the victim of “consumption.” The doctors treating him did not, as in Eddy’s case, prescribe morphine; but he said they gave him so much calomel that his teeth started falling out. 1 Quimby was a practical man, an inventor who loved experiments, so he experimented on himself. He discovered, for instance, that excitement—as in driving a galloping horse before his chariot—blocked out pain (something boxers know, who do not notice broken bones in their hand or nose or jaw in the scramble of the fight itself). 2 He was intrigued, then, by the mind’s ability to affect bodily sensation. This made him react at once to the powers of hypnosis, as demonstrated by Charles Poyen. After meeting Poyen in 1837, Quimby began hypnotizing others. In 1843, he met a young boy so quickly hypnotized, so open to all his suggestions that the lad—Lucius Burkmar—seemed to read Quimby’s mind. The two went on tour giving demonstrations of Burkmar’s capacity for reading what went on inside others’ minds and bodies. Naturally, Quimby tried to use Burkmar to cure his own ailments. Burkmar assured him he could see the disintegrating organs in his body and put them back together by manipulation. The “operation” worked—but Quimby was too rational to believe in it. He came to the conclusion that he was not sick at all, and Burkmar had just made him think of himself as well, on grounds however inadequate. “The disease vanished by the absurdity of the cure.” 3 If that was the case, he could think himself into health without Burkmar—which he proceeded to do, not only for himself but for others.

In treating others, Quimby sympathized with them so thoroughly that he sometimes took on their symptoms, becoming a “scapegoat” for their release from pain. 4 His writings were undertaken to explain to himself and the patient what was happening. They were in the nature of laboratory notes made after an experiment. 5 Since he had received even less formal education than Eddy, and read less widely than she did, his notes are disjointed, full of misspellings, even when corrected by Emma Ware, a patient who was devoted to him. 6

Though Quimby was a successful therapist, he founded no school, elaborated no theoretical system.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.