A Teacher
Helen Wilmans
Mental Science self-treatment: deny disease, affirm omnipresent Life by will
The transmission
Helen Wilmans (1831-1907) was an American journalist turned mental healer who founded and named the system she called “Mental Science.” After a hard mid-life start - her own retelling has her arriving in difficult circumstances with little money - she built a successful publishing concern, a Florida colony, and a large mail-order healing and teaching practice, treating patients and instructing thousands of students by correspondence in her method of mental self-treatment.
Her best-known teaching text, A Home Course in Mental Science, lays out a lesson-by-lesson system in which the student learns to withdraw belief from disease, fear, and weakness and to affirm an omnipresent Life or “I am” as their true power.
The method leans heavily on the will: the student is taught to take a firm inner stance, deny the reality of the limiting condition, and assert their own god-like vitality. Wilmans was also a noted figure in the era’s legal battles over mental and absent healing, which tested the boundaries of mail-order practice in her lifetime.
What they gave
Named “Mental Science”: Gave a distinct identity and curriculum to a strand of the mental-healing movement.
- Self-treatment method: Systematized deny-and-affirm self-treatment - denying disease/weakness, affirming omnipresent Life.
- Posture of the will: Emphasized the deliberate inner stance of the will as the engine of treatment, not passive wishing.
- Correspondence teaching: Spread the practice at scale through a mail-order home course and healing practice.
In their words
Fear is at the bottom of all poverty; fear of others, and distrust of self which is another form of fear, and the most deadly form of all.
And poverty is born of two misconceptions: first, man does not know that opulence is universal, awaiting only the opening of his own mentality to give of itself freely in every manner of uses and luxuries; and second, that he has not the faintest conception of his own power to command it.
The line they stand in
Influenced by: the Quimby mental-healing lineage; Christian Science (which she reworked); Emersonian idealism. Influenced: later New Thought self-treatment and affirmation practice; the will-centered strand of mental healing.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- A Conquest of Poverty1899
- The Conquest of Death1901
- A Home Course in Mental Science1921