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Mind Cure

The name loosely applied to various systems of alternative healing in the late nineteenth century. The name was first applied to the healing system developed by Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802-66) out of his reflections on mesmerism and hypnotism. Quimby, a clockmaker who became a professional mesmerist, observed the power of suggestion on his subjects.

Quimby turned his attention from mesmerist power to focus on the idea of mind. He posited that illness comes from holding delusions or false opinions in the mind (such as those put out by the church or the average physician) and the mind will reproduce in the body the false idea. His healing work consisted of presenting wisdom or truth to the patient, who accepted it and then became well. He operated informally out of Portland, Maine, through the years of the Civil War. He died in 1866 having never published any of his writings. His work was carried on by his various pupils.

The most famous of Quimby's students was Mary Baker Eddy, who in the months after Quimby's death pushed his system in an idealistic direction. She concluded that God was the only reality and that healing was to be found in accepting that reality. From that insight, which differed radically from that of Quimby, she built the Church of Christ, Scientist, the organizational center of the Christian Science movement. Christian Science has four fundamental propositions: (1) God is all in all; (2) God is Good. Good is Mind; (3) God, Spirit, being all, nothing is matter; and (4) Life, God, omnipotent good, deny death, evil, sin, disease. The new church was a phenomenal success and controversy swarmed around it and its founder. Two of Quimby's students, Julius and Annette Dresser, seemingly unaware of how Eddy's system was uniquely her own, challenged Eddy for not giving Quimby the proper credit for originating Christian Science.

Meanwhile, another Quimby student, former Methodist minister turned Swedenborgian, Warren Felt Evans, established a healing practice in Salisbury, Massachusetts, and developed his own healing system as an integral part of his Sweden-borgian thought. Ultimately a pantheist, he wrote a number of books.

As the movement developed, a number of students separated from Eddy and began to operate as independent Christian Science healers. One of them, Joseph Addams, began the Mind Cure Journal in Chicago in the mid 1880s. Other healers with no connection to Eddy, other than possibly having read her books, also appeared on the scene. Those students most attached to Eddy's thought founded what has been a continuing independent Christian Science movement, while the more autonomous thinkers became the founders of what would in the 1890s become known as New Thought. New Thought has been perpetuated through such organizations as the Unity School of Christianity, the Divine Science Association, the Church of Religious Science, and the International New Thought Association. It produced a number of best-selling authors, such as Ralph Waldo Trine, Prentice Mulford, Elizabeth Towne, and Orison Swett Marden.

The term mind cure had largely passed from the scene by the beginning of the twentieth century, but the basic movements, Christian Science, independent Christian Science, and New Thought, have continued. New Thought entered into mainline Christian thought through the efforts of Norman Vincent Peale and more recently Robert Schuler, both ministers in the Reformed Church in America.