impersonally as “Dr. Q,” trying in this way to suggest the impartial observer, puzzled at first to understand the new mode of treatment.
Dr. Quimby did not keep a record of his patients from the point of view of medical diagnosis or opinion, and we do not know just how soon after 1847 he began to give all his time to silent spiritual healing. But in 1861 he writes that he has sat with “more than three hundred individuals every year for ten years, and during the last five with five hundred yearly.” By 1851, then, he was treating as many as three hundred patients a year, and by 1856 the number had increased to five hundred. The greater years of his work in Portland, therefore, beginning in 1859, came after he had had abundant opportunity to test his method to the full.
What this method was we are now prepared to understand in a measure when we note that his early experiments had taught him how to converse with Lucius mentally, and had also shown him that there is a still higher way of communication. When he talked with Lucius it was by way of expressing a merely personal thought or wish, that is, telepathically, as we now say. Such thought-transference included also the transmission of suggestions involving imagery and emotion, such as the mental picture of a bear and the fear of a bear's presence would arouse. Quimby made this transfer effective by vividly creating the mental object in his own mind. Had he stopped there he would have rivalled some of the “applied psychologists” of our day who scorn the idea of anything spiritual.
But by discovering that there is an inner or higher mind, Quimby learned that spirit could talk with spirit. Such conversation did not involve the transfer of personal thought or emotion, but what we who believe in spiritual healing now call “realization,” that is, the vivid picturing of the Divine ideal of man in perfect health and freedom. This spiritual process tended to arouse the same activity or spirit within the patient. It was not the influence of mind on mind, but the operation of spiritual power or Wisdom; for Dr. Quimby objected to the word “power” and always insisted that the real efficiency was Wisdom. That Wisdom is in all men, as Quimby says in his later writings on the subject of “God.” It can be appealed to in all. It is the creative Mind within all. Man's part as healer is to establish
