Phineas Quimby

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby was born in 1802 in Lebanon, New Hampshire, and raised in Belfast, Maine, where he trained as a clockmaker with little formal education. His intellectual turn began in the late 1830s when he attended demonstrations of mesmerism by the touring lecturer Charles Poyen and took up the practice himself, working with a clairvoyant subject, Lucius Burkmar, who appeared able to diagnose illness in trance.

Observing that cures often followed the expectation of cure rather than the prescribed remedy, Quimby gradually abandoned mesmerism’s fluid theories and concluded that disease was rooted in the patient’s mind.

By the 1850s and 1860s, practicing in Portland, Maine, Quimby developed an original system he sometimes called the “Science of Health” or “Science of Christ,” holding that illness is the physical out-picturing of a false belief or “error,” and that healing consists in replacing that error with the “truth” through a kind of mental and conversational reasoning with the patient.

Though he published almost nothing in his lifetime—his ideas survive in manuscripts compiled long after his 1866 death—Quimby is widely regarded as the fountainhead of the New Thought tradition, the first to systematize the claim that mind is the cause of bodily condition.