Phineas Quimby: The Clockmaker Behind New Thought

Phineas Quimby never published a book, founded a church or led a movement. Yet he is often called the founder of New Thought, and a long argument about his influence still surrounds the founder of Christian Science. This article sets out what he taught, who carried it on, and where the record is contested.

A Clockmaker from New England

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby was born on February 16, 1802, in Lebanon, New Hampshire, one of seven children of a blacksmith. He had little formal schooling. By trade he was a watch and clockmaker, and he also worked as a daguerreotypist and held patents for mechanical devices, among them a permutation lock and a steering apparatus for ships.

His interest in the mind and body began with his own illness. He later wrote that he had consumption, what we now call tuberculosis, in his youth, and that the calomel his doctor prescribed did not help and damaged his teeth. He found that intense excitement, such as galloping on horseback, eased his symptoms for a time, and he came to believe he had cured himself. That pointed him toward the question that would occupy the rest of his life: how far does the mind shape the condition of the body?

From Mesmerism to Mental Healing

In the 1830s and 1840s, mesmerism, also called animal magnetism, was touring New England. The French mesmerist Charles Poyen lectured in Maine around 1836. Quimby was not impressed. He later wrote that he heard one of Poyen's lectures and "pronounced it a humbug as a matter of course." A popular story says Quimby followed Poyen from town to town, but that account comes from a 1907 magazine serial and is not supported by Quimby's own writings or his family. It seems more likely that the mesmerist Robert Hanham Collyer, who visited Belfast, Maine, in 1841, caught his interest.

Around 1842 Quimby met Lucius Burkmar, a young man who was unusually responsive to hypnosis. The two toured together, with Quimby giving public demonstrations of mesmeric trance. In time Quimby stopped touring and turned to healing, without trance or medicine. He taught that disease was caused by false beliefs and that the cure lay in explaining this to the patient.

A flyer he used in the late 1850s and early 1860s set out his method. He said he gave no medicines and made no outward applications, but "simply sits down by the patients, tells them their feelings and what they think is their disease." The flyer put the whole idea in one phrase: "The Truth is the Cure." It also stated that he had practiced for seventeen years and had given no medicines for the past eight.

Part of this matches modern research on the placebo effect, where expectation measurably changes how people feel. Quimby went further, believing that correcting a mistaken belief could change the body itself. That stronger claim has never been shown.

The Patients Who Carried His Ideas

By the early 1860s Quimby was treating patients in Portland, Maine. Several of them went on to shape what came next.

Julius and Annetta Dresser. Julius Dresser became ill while at college and visited Quimby in 1860. He credited Quimby with his recovery and became a follower of what he called the "Quimby System of Mental Treatment of Diseases." He met Annetta Seabury at Quimby's office and married her in 1863. In 1882 the couple moved to Boston to practice and later teach Quimby's method. Their son, Horatio Dresser, later became Quimby's main editor and a historian of New Thought.

Warren Felt Evans. Evans was a Methodist minister who left that church in 1863 for the Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem. He visited Quimby twice for his health, traditionally dated to around 1863. The historian Catherine Albanese has questioned that timeline, since Evans's journals never mention Quimby. Evans went on to write a series of books, including The Mental Cure in 1869 and Mental Medicine in 1872, which set out a system of mental healing in print years before Quimby's own writings were available. Modern scholarship tends to see Evans as Quimby's equal rather than simply his student.

Mary Baker Eddy. The best known patient, then called Mary Patterson, had been chronically ill for years. Her husband wrote to Quimby in 1861, and in October 1862 she went to Portland for treatment. She improved quickly, though relapses followed. In November 1862 she wrote to the Portland Evening Courier praising him and denying that he practiced spiritualism or animal magnetism. Over the next few years she held long discussions with Quimby and took notes on his ideas.

The Eddy Dispute

Quimby died on January 16, 1866. On February 1 of that year, Eddy fell on ice in Swampscott, Massachusetts. Two weeks later she asked Julius Dresser to heal her, and he declined. She later described her recovery after reading of Jesus healing the sick as the moment she discovered Christian Science. In 1875 she published Science and Health, presenting Christian Science as a divinely revealed system.

The Dressers saw things differently. In 1887 Julius Dresser publicly accused Eddy of taking Quimby's ideas without credit, in a lecture printed as The True History of Mental Science. After his death, Annetta continued the case in The Philosophy of P. P. Quimby, published in 1895. Horatio Dresser edited The Quimby Manuscripts in 1921, the first broad publication of Quimby's writings.

Historians still disagree. Caroline Fraser has written that Eddy did not plagiarize Quimby but was indebted to him for the basic concepts and language of mind healing. Martin Gardner said she owed Quimby a "great debt" that she later played down. Gillian Gill has argued that scholars who accused Eddy of plagiarism showed willful bias, while still granting that Quimby had a profound influence on her. Robert Peel suggested that some of Eddy's own ideas may have entered the manuscripts later published under Quimby's name.

There is also a difference in substance. Quimby's son George wrote that in his father's method of healing "religion played no part," and the historian Stephen Gottschalk argued that Quimby's religious ideas had "nothing whatever in common" with Christian Science. Not everyone accepts that line. Gardner described Quimby as a "deeply religious man" who saw his healing as the same as that of Jesus, and noted that Quimby used the phrase "Christian Science" in an unpublished 1863 article. The fairest summary is that Eddy learned a great deal from Quimby and then built something distinct on top of it.

How New Thought Grew from Him

New Thought took shape in the 1880s and 1890s through healers, teachers and small groups. Emma Curtis Hopkins, who studied with Eddy and briefly edited The Christian Science Journal, broke with her and taught in Chicago, where she trained many later leaders and became known as the "teacher of teachers." The Church of Divine Science was founded in 1888 and Unity in 1889. William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902, treated the whole current as the "mind-cure movement" and took its reported healings seriously as psychological facts.

Quimby's place in all this is real but indirect. Because his manuscripts were not published until 1921, they could not have shaped New Thought during its formative years. His ideas traveled through people: through Evans's books, through the Dressers' teaching, and through Eddy and the students who left her. The later currents of the movement, from William Walker Atkinson's Thought Vibration to the modern law of attraction, took the basic idea that thought shapes experience much further than Quimby himself did.

Some later writers also dressed these ideas in older language. The Kybalion of 1908 presented New Thought psychology as ancient Hermeticism, with a Principle of Mentalism that sounds far grander than anything Quimby claimed. Readers who want the real ancient material should go to the Corpus Hermeticum, which is a very different kind of text.

What to Take from Quimby

Quimby was an inventive, self taught man who noticed something true: belief, expectation and explanation affect how people feel when they are ill. Modern work on expectation, and on practices such as meditation and slow breathwork, has measured parts of that link. He also went beyond the evidence, and the claim that correcting a belief can cure any disease has never been supported. Read him as an early explorer of the mind and body link, not as a medical authority.

Sources and further reading

• Phineas Quimby (Wikipedia)
• Mesmerism (Wikipedia)
• Warren Felt Evans (Wikipedia)