Phineas Parkhurst Quimby

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Her next husband, a dentist by the name of Patterson, eventually left her, but by this point she had met the figure who would dictate the future course of her life, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802-66).

Baker, on hearing of the miraculous cures being administered by Quimby, decided to travel to Maine from Boston in order to gain an audience with this Swedenborgian. She and Quimby first met at the International Hotel in Portland, Maine, in October 1862.

Baker was immediately taken by his ideas and his personal magnetism. He was a healer who denied the efficacy of medicine and proposed instead that the only real curative force was that of the patient's belief in the healer and his ability to heal.

Quimby possessed a strong personal magnetism, and although he was poorly educated, he managed to mould his experiences into a philosophy; he founded the anti-materialist Swedenborgian school of New Thought, whose following included at least a dozen other American healers.

Quimby claimed disarmingly that his cures were not due to any paranormal force but instead merely to the faith that his various patients had in him, and this alone. Quimby opined: T tell the patient his troubles, and what he thinks is his disease, and my explanation is the cure.'

His results were obtained by placing his hand on the patient's head and abdomen in order to let the healing magnetic forces take hold. In this he believed that he had rediscovered the very method that Jesus had employed in healing. He would eventually discard his mesmerism for a metaphysical form of faith healing. Quimby was significant in the history of faith healing because he forged a link between the use of the hypnotic and the wholly suggestive approaches, as he progressed from the former to the latter in his career.

Quimby urged that we 'think good, not evil'. If the mind could be cleared of negative thoughts, then this would lead to a healthy body. Baker told Quimby that she had been suffering from 'spinal inflammation'. The cure administered by Quimby began to be effective before their consultation-her anticipation built up to such an extent that she felt better even before he ministered to her.

His treatment ensured that she could walk normally and climb stairs again. Eventually she succumbed to invalidity and gastric pains once more, but she had become a firm believer in Quimby's ideas, although prior to meeting Quimby she had written 'If I believe I am sick, I am sick ... all disease is in the mind.' She spent the next two years adapting Quimby's philosophy to her own ideas and would one day dismiss him as an 'illiterate mesmerist' and deride his mesmerism as a 'big bubble', an idea she had long been disabused of.

In October 1865, Eddy's father died. Quimby himself met with illness. He had resisted orthodox medicine in the treatment of his illness, a stomach ulcer, and instead insisted that his illness could be brought to heel by the power of his own 'active will'. He died in January 1866.

In February 1866 came the formative moment, when Baker slipped on an icy patch in the street and was knocked unconscious. She claimed her miraculous recovery was accountable to her reliance on the Bible. From being an incurable invalid, she recovered enough to be able to walk around unaided. Some commentators have speculated that Baker's illness was the result of a neurotic depressive reaction. As the Christian Science movement gained ground her health continued to fluctuate wildly, depending on her mood and situation.

This single-minded child of the Calvinist gloom appropriated a mixture of the ideas of Quimby and German metaphysics in the development of her movement. Some observers describe Christian Science as an amalgam of a metaphysical system that relies on an obsolete theory of logical monism adjusted from the German Idealists, a Christian sect and a method of therapy.