Warren Felt Evans

Warren Felt Evans (1817–1889) was an American author and the first writer to set the new mental healing into systematic, published book form. A former Methodist minister who became a Swedenborgian, Evans encountered the healing methods of Phineas Quimby around 1863 and, in 1869 — only three years after Quimby’s death — published The Mental Cure, the first book in the field of mental healing.

He opened a healing practice near Boston in 1867 and, with his wife, taught and practiced the principles of mind cure for more than two decades, producing further works such as Mental Medicine and The Primitive Mind-Cure.

His significance is foundational: because Quimby never published, Evans was the first to give the emerging mind-cure its theoretical articulation and bring it before a reading public. He fused Quimby’s practical healing with the idealism of Berkeley and the spiritual correspondences of Swedenborg, framing disease as rooted in mental and spiritual states and cure as a change of mind.

In doing so he became the first systematic theorist of what would crystallize into New Thought, laying the intellectual groundwork on which later teachers built.