s one of the key
words of Christian Science. Quimby was led to identify sickness and
wrong beliefs through this analysis of mesmeric diagnosis and health and
right belief through his own experiences as a healer. He had no training
to help him to an understanding of the real facts which lay behind the
belief in sickness. He became a skillful diagnostician of states of mind
and a healer of such diseases as could be so treated. But he knew,
scientifically, no more of what lay behind it all than a ploughman may
know of what lies beneath the furrows he turns.

_Quimby Develops His Theories_

Mrs. Eddy took over the catch-words of his system and its loose
assumptions, and a reasonably careful comparison of the Quimby
manuscripts and "Science and Health" shows not only Mrs. Eddy's
fundamental and never honestly acknowledged and finally categorically
denied indebtedness to Quimby, but the confusion which Quimby's rather
striking and original philosophy suffered at her hands. Beginning with
his persuasion that health and sickness are phases of belief Quimby
discarded mesmerism altogether and addressed himself to the minds of his
patients. He had doubtless a keen intuitive knowledge of human nature
and its morbid fancies and he was dealing generally with neurotic
temperaments over which he exercised a strong and helpful power of
suggestion. His explanation of disease--that it is a wrong
belief--becomes grotesque enough when he comes down to detail. This, for
example, is his diagnosis of Bronchitis--"You listen or eat this belief
or wisdom [evidently that Bronchitis is real] as you would eat your
meals. It sets rather hard upon your stomach; this disturbs the error of
your body and a cloud appears in the sky.... The elements of the body of
your belief are shaken, earth is lit up by the fire of your error, the
heat rises, the heaven or mind grows dark ... the lightning of hot
flashes shoot to all parts of the solar system of your belief. At last
the winds or chills strike the earth or surface of the body, a cold
clammy sensation passes over you. This changes the heat into a sort of
watery substance which works its way into the channels and pores to the
head and stomach."[22]

[Footnote 22: "Quimby Manuscripts," p. 118.]

This is Quimby at his worst but beneath it is the germ of the method and
philosophy which have attained so luxurious a growth--the explaining,
that is, of disease in terms of wrong belief. Inevitably in the