# The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy/Chapter 06

CHAPTER VI
THE QUIMBY CONTROVERSY CONTINUED—MRS. EDDY'S ATTEMPTS TO DISCREDIT QUIMBY—HER CHARGE THAT HE WAS ALWAYS A MESMERIST—QUIMBY'S ADHERENTS DEFEND HIM
The controversy is chiefly upon two points: whether Quimby healed mentally, through the divine power of mind, or physically, through mesmerism or animal magnetism; and whether he himself developed his own theory and wrote his own manuscripts or obtained his ideas from Mrs. Eddy. Mrs. Eddy, when accused of having appropriated Quimby's theories, has always declared that her system had not the slightest similarity to his. Christian Scientists heal by the direct power of God, precisely as did Jesus Himself. They regard mesmerism, or hypnotism, as the supreme error. "Animal magnetism," once wrote the Rev. James Henry Wiggin, Mrs. Eddy's literary adviser, "is her devil. No church can long get on without a devil, you know." Therefore, if Mrs. Eddy proves that Quimby practised this art, and healed by it, to her followers she has more than proved her case. In Retrospection and Introspection, she says that Quimby was a "magnetic doctor," and implies that he was a spiritualist. "It was in Massachusetts, February, 1866," she says, "and after the death of the magnetic doctor, Mr. P. P. Quimby, whom Spiritualists would associate therewith, but who was in no-wise connected with this ​event, that I discovered the Science of Divine Metaphysical Healing, which I afterwards named Christian Science." This idea she has elaborated many times. In Miscellaneous Writings she tells the story of her visit to Quimby in these words:
About the year 1862, while the author of this work was at Dr. Vail's Hydropathic Institute in New Hampshire, this occurred: A patient considered incurable left that institution, and in a few weeks returned apparently well, having been healed, as he informed the patients, by one Mr. P. P. Quimby, of Portland, Maine.
After much consultation among ourselves, and a struggle with pride, the author, in company with several other patients, left the Water Cure, en route for the aforesaid doctor in Portland. He proved to be a magnetic practitioner. His treatment seemed at first to relieve her but signally failed in healing her case.
Having practised Homeopathy, it never occurred to the author to learn his practice, but she did ask him how manipulation could benefit the sick. He answered kindly and squarely, in substance, "Because it conveys electricity to them." That was the sum of what he taught her of his medical profession.
In the Christian Science Journal for June, 1887, Mrs. Eddy repeats the same idea:
I never heard him intimate that he healed disease mentally; and many others will testify that, up to his last sickness, he treated us magnetically, manipulating our heads, and making passes in the air while he stood in front of us. During his treatments I felt like one having hold of an electric battery and standing on an insulated stool. His healing was never considered or called anything but Mesmerism.
In numerous other articles, Mrs. Eddy has declared that Quimby healed by animal magnetism; that he never said he healed mentally, never recognised the superiority of mind to matter, or any divine principle in his work. These statements, however, hardly agree with that made in the letter to W. W. Wright, written in 1871 and quoted in this chapter, in which ​she refers to Quimby as "an old gentleman who had made it a research for twenty-five years, starting from the standpoint of magnetism, thence going forward and leaving that behind."
In the letter published on November 7, 1862, in the Portland Courier, Mrs. Eddy herself defended Quimby from the very charge which she now brings against him—that he healed by animal magnetism. On this point, she wrote:
Again, is it by animal magnetism that he heals the sick? Let us examine. I have employed electro-magnetism and animal magnetism, and for a brief interval have felt relief, from the equilibrium which I fancied was restored to an exhausted system or by a diffusion of concentrated action. But in no instance did I get rid of a return of all my ailments, because I had not been helped out of the error in which opinions involved us. My operator believed in disease, independent of the mind; hence I could not be wiser than my master. But now I can see dimly at first, and only as trees walking, the great principle which underlies Dr. Quimby's faith and works; and just in proportion to my right perception of truth is my recovery. This truth which he opposes to the error of giving intelligence to matter and placing pain where it never placed itself, if received understandingly, changes the currents of the system to their normal action; and the mechanism of the body goes on undisturbed. That this is a science capable of demonstration, becomes clear to the minds of those patients who reason upon the process of their cure. The truth which he establishes in the patient cures him (although he may be wholly unconscious thereof); and the body, which is full of light, is no longer in disease. . . . After all, this is a very spiritual doctrine; but the eternal years of God are with it, and it must stand firm as the rock of ages. And to many a poor sufferer it may be found, as by me, "the shadow of a great rock in a weary land."
Hardly anything could be more specific than this.
In 1862, Mrs. Eddy, while she was still Quimby's patient, declared that he healed, not by animal magnetism, but by the "truth which he opposes to the error of giving intelligence to matter and placing pain where it never placed itself." Again, "the truth which he establishes in the patient cures him . . . ​and the body, which is full of light, is no longer in disease."
In 1871, while teaching and practising Quimby's method for a livelihood, she declared that he started "from the stand point of magnetism, thence going forward and leaving that behind."
In 1887, when at the head of a great organisation of her own, she says: "he treated us magnetically. . . . His healing was never considered or called anything but Mesmerism."
Now Mrs. Eddy says that Quimby's method was purely "physical"; then, in 1862, she wrote that, "after all, this is a very spiritual doctrine," and describes it as "the great principle which underlies Dr. Quimby's faith and works." In another communication to the Portland Courier, written November, 1862, Mrs. Eddy specifically declared that Quimby healed after Christ's method. She said:
P. P. Quimby stands upon the plane of wisdom with his truth. Christ healed the sick, but not by jugglery or with drugs. As the former speaks as never man before spake, and heals as never man healed since Christ, is he not identified with truth? And is not this the Christ which is in him? We know that in wisdom is life, "and the life was the light of man." P. P. Quimby rolls away the stone from the sepulchre of error, and health is the resurrection. But we also know that "light shineth in darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not."
Mrs. Eddy repeated the same thought in the verses which she published, over her own name, in a Lynn newspaper, on February 22, 1866. She entitled them, "Lines on the Death of Dr. P. P. Quimby, Who Healed with the Truth that Christ Taught in Contradistinction to All Isms." The letters written by Mrs. Eddy to Quimby in the years 1862, '63, '64, and '65, extracts from which were printed, express the same conviction. ​On September 14, 1863, in asking for an "absent treatment," Mrs. Eddy wrote: "I would like to have you in your omnipresence visit me at eight o'clock this evening." In a letter dated Warren, May, 1864, she writes that she has been ill, but adds, "I am up and about today, i.e., by the help of the Lord (Quimby)." In the quotation from Retrospection and Introspection above, Mrs. Eddy associates Quimby with spiritualists. Yet, forty years ago, she delivered a public lecture to prove that he was not a spiritualist. She records the event in a letter to Quimby, dated Warren, April 24, 1864:
Jesus taught as man does not, who then is wise but you? Posted at the public marts of this city is this notice, Mrs. M. M. Patterson will lecture at the Town Hall on P. P. Quimby's Spiritual Science healing disease, as opposed to Deism or Rochester Rapping Spiritualism.
Quimby's manuscripts, his defenders assert, clearly show that when Mrs. Eddy knew him he had dropped mesmerism for his new system. In 1859—three years before he ever saw Mrs. Eddy—he clearly distinguished between physical and spiritual healing—between the permanent healing of disease through God, Wisdom, or the Christ method, and its temporary and ineffectual healing through ignorance, symbolically called Beelzebub.
The question is asked me by some, is the curing of disease a science? I answer yes. You may ask who is the founder of that science? I answer Jesus Christ. Then comes the question, what proof have you that it is a science? Because Christ healed the sick, that of itself is no proof that he knew what he was doing. If it was done, it must have been done by some law or science, for there can be no such thing as accident with God, and if Christ was God, he did know what he was doing. When he was accused of curing disease through Beelzebub or ignorance, he said, If I cast out devils or disease through Beelzebub or ignorance, my kingdom or science cannot stand, but if I cast out devils or disease through a science ​or law, then my kingdom or law will stand, for it is not of this world. When others cast out disease they cured by ignorance, or Beelzebub, and there was no science in the cure, although an effect was produced, but not knowing the cause, the world was none the wiser for their cures. At another time when told by his disciples, that persons were casting out devils in his name, and they forbid them, he said, they that are with us are not against us, but they that are not with us, or are ignorant of the laws of curing, scattereth abroad, for the world is none the wiser. There you see, he makes a difference between his mode of curing and theirs. If Christ's cures were done by the power of God, and Christ was God, he must have known what that power or science was, and if he did, he knew the difference between his science, and their ignorance. His science was His Kingdom, therefore it was not of this world, and theirs being of this world, he called it the Kingdom of Darkness. To enter into Christ's Kingdom, or science, was to enter into the laws of knowledge, of curing the evils of this world of darkness. As disease is an evil, it is of this world and in this kingdom of darkness. To separate one world from another, is to separate life, the resurrection of one is the destruction of the other.
Mrs. Eddy, to prove that Quimby was merely a mesmerist, emphasises the fact that he frequently rubbed his patients' heads. According to the present Christian Science belief, that is the cardinal sin. Physical contact with the patient implies that the treatment is of this world; in order that healing be Divine, Christ-like, its only instrument must be mind. On this one point the controversy has been long and bitter. It figures as conspicuously in this dispute as did the word filioque in the contentions of the early Christian Church. Mrs. Eddy, in the Christian Science Journal of June, 1887, says:
If, as Mr. Dresser says, Mr. Quimby's theory (if he had one) and practice were like mine, purely mental, what need had he of such physical means as wetting his hands in water and rubbing the head? Yet these appliances he continued until he ceased practice; and in his last sickness the poor man employed a homeopathic physician. The Science of Mind-healing would be lost by such means and it is a moral impossibility to understand or to demonstrate this science through such extraneous aids. Mr. Quimby, ​never to my knowledge, thought that matter was mind; and he never intimated to me that he healed mentally, or by the aid of mind. Did he believe matter and mind to be one, and then rub matter in order to convince the mind of truth? Which did he manipulate with his hands, matter or mind? Was Mr. Quimby's entire method of treating the sick intended to hoodwink his patients?
Quimby's followers freely admit that, on some occasions, he dipped his hands in water and rubbed the patient's head. They deny, however, that this was an essential part of the cure. Mr. Julius A. Dresser explains the circumstances thus:
Some may desire to ask, if in his practice, he ever in any way used manipulation. I reply that, in treating a patient, after he had finished his explanations, and the silent work, which completed the treatment, he usually rubbed the head two or three times, in a brisk manner, for the purpose of letting the patient see that something was done. This was a measure of securing the confidence of the patient at a time when he was starting a new practice, and stood alone in it. I knew him to make many and quick cures at a distance sometimes with persons he never saw at all. He never considered the touch of the hand as at all necessary; but let it be governed by circumstances, as was done eighteen hundred years ago.
In Mrs. Eddy's early days, she treated in precisely the same way. As will be described in the next chapter, she lived in several Massachusetts towns, teaching and practising the Quimby cure. She always instructed her students, after treating their patients mentally, to rub their heads. In addition, Mrs. Eddy would dip her hands in water and lay them over the stomach of the patient, repeating, as she did this, the words: "Peace, be still." Several of Mrs. Eddy's students of that time are still practising, and they still, in accordance with her instructions of nearly forty years ago, manipulate their patients. It was not until 1872 that she learned that the ​practice was pernicious. She tells the story as follows, in a pamphlet, The Science of Man, published in 1876:
When we commenced this science, we permitted students to manipulate the head, ignorant that it could do harm, or hinder the power of mind acting in an opposite direction, viz., while the hands were at work and the mind directing material action. We regret to say it was the sins of a young student that called our attention to this question for the first time, and placed it in a new moral and physical aspect. By thorough examination and tests, we learned manipulation hinders instead of helps mental healing; it also establishes a mesmeric connection between patient and practitioner that gives the latter opportunity and power to govern the thoughts and actions of his patients in any direction he chooses, and with error instead of truth. This can injure the patients and must always prevent a scientific result. . . . Since our discovery of this malpractice in 1872, we have never permitted a student with our consent to manipulate in the least, and this process unlearned is utterly worthless to benefit the sick.
This is an admission on Mrs. Eddy's part that, for six years after her discovery of the "absolute principle of metaphysical healing," she herself taught the method which she now asserts disproves that Quimby ever healed by the power of mind. Quimby's adherents maintain that the fact that during these six years she followed his instructions implicitly and rubbed her patients' heads, is merely another proof that she obtained her original conception of mental healing from him. In Miscellaneous Writings Mrs. Eddy explains this head-rubbing on the same ground as did Quimby,—that is, that the average weak and doubting mind needed an outward sign:
It was after Mr. Quimby's death, that I discovered, in 1866, the momentous facts relating to Mind and its superiority over matter, and named my discovery Christian Science. Yet, there remained the difficulty of adjusting in the scale of Science a metaphysical practice, and settling the question, What shall be the outward sign of such a practice: if a ​Divine Principle alone heals, what is the human modus for demonstrating this? . . . My students at first practised in slightly different forms. Although I could heal mentally, without a sign save the immediate recovery of the sick, my students' patients, and people generally, called for a sign a material evidence wherewith to satisfy the sick that something was being done for them; and I said, "Suffer it to be so now," for thus saith our Master. Experience, however, taught me the impossibility of demonstrat ing the Science of Metaphysical Healing by any outward form of practice.
Other pupils of Quimby, among them Mr. Julius A. Dresser, resented his being presented to the world by Mrs. Eddy as a mesmerist and magnetic healer. They asserted again and again that he healed by mental science purely, and that Mrs. Eddy had misrepresented him and his methods. Mr. Dresser made a statement to that effect in the Boston Post, February 24, 1883. Mrs. Eddy replied to this letter (Boston Post, March 7, 1883), admitting that Quimby "may have had a theory in advance of his method," but making the claim that it was she who first asked him to "write his thoughts out," and that she would sometimes so transform his manuscripts that they were virtually her own compositions. She says:
We never were a student of Dr. Quimby's. . . . Dr. Quimby never had students, to our knowledge. He was an Humanitarian, but a very unlearned man. He never published a work in his life; was not a lecturer or teacher. He was somewhat of a remarkable healer, and at the time we knew him he was known as a mesmerist. We were one of his patients. He manipulated his patients, but possibly back of his practice he may have had a theory in advance of his method. . . . We knew him about twenty years ago, and aimed to help him. We saw he was looking in our direction, and asked him to write his thoughts out. He did so, and then we would take that copy to correct, and sometimes so transform it that he would say it was our composition, which it virtually was; but we always gave him back the copy and sometimes wrote his name on the back of it.
​In a revised edition of Julius A. Dresser's pamphlet, The True History of Mental Science, Mr. Dresser's son, Horatio W. Dresser, says:
It has frequently been claimed that Mrs. Eddy was Quimby's secretary, and that she helped him to formulate his ideas. It has also been stated that these manuscripts were Mrs. Eddy's writings, left by her in Portland; that the articles printed in this pamphlet were Mrs. Eddy's words, as nearly as she can recollect them (Christian Science Sentinel, February 16, 1899). There is absolutely no truth in any of these statements or suppositions. Mrs. Eddy never saw a page of the original manuscripts; and Volume I, loaned her by my father in 1862, was his copy from a copy. Mrs. Eddy may have made a copy of this volume for her own use, but the majority even of the copied articles Mrs. Eddy never saw. I have read and copied all of these articles, and can certify that they contain a very original and complete statement of the data and theory of mental healing. There are over eight hundred closely written pages, covering one hundred and twenty subjects, written previous to March, 1862, more than six months before Mrs. Eddy went to Dr. Quimby.
In the 1884 edition of Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy, writing of Quimby, says:
The old gentleman to whom we have referred had some very advanced views on healing, but he was not avowedly religious neither scholarly. We interchanged thoughts on the subject of healing the sick. I restored some patients of his that he failed to heal, and left in his possession some manuscripts of mine containing corrections of his desultory pennings which I am informed, at his decease, passed into the hands of a patient of his, now residing in Scotland. He died in 1865 and left no published works. The only manuscript that we ever held of his, longer than to correct it, was one of perhaps a dozen pages, most of which we had composed.
This manuscript of "perhaps a dozen pages," is clearly the one called by Quimby, Questions and Answers. The original copy, now in the possession of the writer, in the handwriting of Quimby's wife, is dated February, 1862, eight months before ​Quimby had ever seen Mrs. Eddy. From this manuscript Mrs. Eddy taught for several years after Quimby's death, and she sold copies of it to her early students for $300 each. Its history will be given in detail and its contents analysed in the next chapter.
In refutation of Mrs. Eddy's general assertion that she herself taught Quimby what he knew about mental science, and that she corrected and so largely contributed to the Quimby manuscripts, Quimby's defenders again quote Mrs. Eddy herself. They once more draw upon her early letter to the Portland Courier. This, they say, does not read like a letter written by master to pupil. If Mrs. Eddy were the teacher and Quimby the student, would she, they ask, speak of him in this wise? "Now, then, his works are but the result of superior wisdom, which can demonstrate a science not understood. . . . But now I can see dimly at first, and only as trees walking, the great principle which underlies Dr. Quimby's faith and works; and just in proportion to my right perception of truth is my recovery." If Mrs. Eddy, they add, were at that time writing Quimby's manuscripts, would she, in this same letter, have expressed herself thus:—"At present I am too much in error to elucidate the truth, and can touch only the keynote for the master hand to wake the harmony. . . . To many a poor sufferer may it be found, as by me, 'the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.' "
Mrs. Eddy's poem on Quimby's death, already quoted, is apparently the grateful tribute of pupil to teacher. Its concluding lines ill sustain Mrs. Eddy's present position:
| " | Rest should reward him who hath made us whole, |
| | Seeking, though tremblers, where his footsteps trod." |
Her letters to Quimby, 1862-'65, also fail to substantiate this impression that Quimby was under Mrs. Eddy's instruction. "I have the utmost faith in your philosophy," she wrote in 1862. Other phrases, scattered through the letters, read:
"Dear doctor, what could I do without you? . . . I am to all who see me a living wonder, and a living monument of your power. . . . My explanation of your curative principle surprises people. . . . Who is wise but you?" She wrote from Warren, Me., in the spring of 1865, that she had been asked to treat sick people after the Quimby method. She refuses to do so, she adds, because she considers that she is still in her "pupilage."
In connection with Mrs. Eddy's claim that she herself largely wrote the Quimby manuscripts, the following extract from an affidavit of Mrs. Sarah G. Crosby of Waterville, Me., an intimate friend of Mrs. Eddy when she was under Quimby's treatment, is also of interest:
I know little of the history of said Mrs. Patterson between 1866 and 1877, when she called me professionally to Lynn, in February, 1877, a few weeks after her marriage to Asa G. Eddy, to report a course of lessons to a class of nine pupils. She told me she wished a copy of these lessons for Mr. Eddy to study, that he, too, might teach classes. These lectures were in all material respects the same as I had myself been taught by said Dr. Quimby and that Mrs. Patterson and I had so often discussed, and which she had tried so hard to make me understand and adopt when we were together in Portland and later in Albion;—the same teaching about Truth and Error and matter and disease, the same method of curing disease by Truth casting out Error, the same claim that it was the method ​adopted by Jesus. I do not hesitate to say that Mrs. Eddy's teachings in 1877, and Dr. Quimby's teachings in 1864 were substantially the same; in fact, as I heard them both, I know they were.
In June, 1883, an attorney representing said Mrs. Patterson came to see me at Waterville, my present home, and interviewed me regarding her work with Dr. Quimby in Portland in 1864. I refused to answer his questions and he left, but returned the next day bearing an affectionate letter from said Mrs. Patterson. The following is a copy thereof:—
"My dear Sister,
       Sarah,— I wanted to see you myself but it was impossible for me to leave my home and so have sent the bearer of this note to see you for me.
Two nights ago I had a sweet dream of Albert and the dear face was so familiar, Oh how I loved him! and in the morning a thought popped into my head to ask Sarah to help me in this very trying hour.
These are the circumstances. A student of my husband's took the class-book of mine that he studied, put his name to most of it, and published it as his own after he was through with the class.
Then was the time I ought to have sued him, but Oh, I do so dislike a quarrel that I hoped to get over it without a law-suit.
So I noticed in my next edition of 'Science and Health' his infringement with a sharp reprimand thinking that would stop him, but this winter he issued another copy of my work as the author, and then I sued him. The next thing he did was to publish the falsehood that I stole my works from the late Dr. Quimby. When everything I ever had published has been written or edited by me as spontaneously as I teach or lecture.
​Now dear one, I want you to tell this man, the bearer of this note, that you know that Dr. Quimby and I were friends and that I used to take his scribblings and fix them over for him and give him my thoughts and language which as I understood it, were far in advance of his.
Will you do this and give an affidavit to this effect and greatly oblige your Affectionate Sister Mary."
I read the foregoing appeal for help from said Mrs. Patterson, then Eddy, and as it was clearly a request that I should make oath to what was not true, I informed the attorney that I should not make the affidavit asked by his client, as it would not be a true statement. He then threatened to summon me to the trial, but I think I made him understand that I would not be a desirable witness on his side of the case. He thereupon departed, and I was not summoned to testify. And since that interview, I have only a public knowledge of said Mrs. Patterson-Eddy.
In her private correspondence, Mrs. Eddy has said, in so many words, that she taught the Quimby system. Reference has already been made to the correspondence in March, 1871, between Mrs. Eddy—then Mrs. Glover—and Mr. W. W. Wright of Lynn. Mr. Wright specifically asked this question:
6th: Has this theory ever been advertised or practised before you introduced it, or by any other individual?
To this Mrs. Eddy replied:
6th: Never advertised, and practised by only one individual who healed me, Dr. Quimby of Portland, Me, an old gentleman who had made it a research for twenty-five years, starting from the stand-point of magnetism thence going forward and leaving that behind. I discovered the art in a moment's time, and he acknowledged it to me; he died shortly after and since then, eight years, I have been founding and demonstrating the science. . . . please preserve this, and if you become my student call me to account for the truth of what I have written
    Respectfully
    M M B Glover
Mrs. Eddy has never attempted to reconcile the statements which she made before the publication of Science and Health with the very different ones which she has made since.
​The explanation by which she seeks to account for her early expressions of devotion and gratitude to Quimby is not one which tends to lessen the perplexities of the historian. She simply asserts that she wrote these tributes to Quimby while under mesmeric influence and is not properly responsible for them at all.
In the Boston Post, in a letter dated March 7, 1883, after Julius A. Dresser had made public some of the letters already quoted, she wrote as follows:
Did I write those articles purporting to be mine? I might have written them twenty or thirty years ago, for I was under the mesmeric treatment of Dr. Quimby from 1862 until his death in 1865. He was illiterate and I knew nothing then of the Science of Mind-healing, and I was as ignorant of mesmerism as Eve before she was taught by the serpent. Mind Science was unknown to me; and my head was so turned by animal magnetism and will-power, under his treatment, that I might have written something as hopelessly incorrect as the articles now published in the Dresser pamphlet. I was not healed until after the death of Mr. Quimby; and then healing came as the result of my discovery in 1866, of the Science of Mind-healing, since named Christian Science.
In 1887, when Julius A. Dresser published his True History of Mental Science, the Quimby-Eddy controversy reached its climax. Mrs. Eddy, says Horatio W. Dresser, requested her literary adviser, Rev. James Henry Wiggin, to answer the pamphlet. Mr. Wiggin asked Mrs. Eddy if she had written the letters in the Portland newspapers, the letter to Dresser, the poem on Quimby's death, and other effusions. Mrs. Eddy admitted that she had. "Then," replied Mr. Wiggin, "there is nothing to say," and declined the task. In a personal letter Mr. Wiggin says:
What Mrs. Eddy has, as documents clearly prove, she got from P. P. Quimby, of Portland, Me., whom she eulogised after death as the great ​leader and her special teacher. . . . She has tried to answer this charge of the adoption of Quimby's ideas, and called me in to counsel her about it; but her only answer (in print!) was that if she said such things twenty years ago, she must have been under the influence of Animal Magnetism.
Mrs. Eddy, however, issued the following challenge:
To whom it may concern:
Mr. George A. Quimby son of the late Phineas P. Quimby, over his own signature and before witnesses, stated in 1883, that he had in his possession at that time all the manuscript that had been written by his father. And I hereby declare that to expose the falsehood of parties publicly intimating that I have appropriated matter belonging to the aforesaid Quimby, I will pay the cost of printing and publishing the first edition of those manuscripts with the author's name:
Provided, that I am allowed first to examine said manuscripts, and do find that they were his own compositions, and not mine, that were left with him many years ago, or that they have not since his death, in 1865, been stolen from my published works. Also that I am given the right to bring out this one edition under the copyright of the owner of said manuscripts, and all the money accruing from the sales of said book shall be paid to said owner. Some of his purported writings, quoted by Mr. D——, were my own words as near as I can recollect them.
There is a great demand for my work, "Science and Health, with Key to Scriptures," hence Mr. D——'s excuse for the delay to publish Quimby's manuscripts namely, that this period is not sufficiently enlightened to be benefited by them (?) is lost, for if I have copied from Quimby, and my book is accepted, it has created a demand for his.
Mary Baker G. Eddy.
This proposition was ignored by Mr. Quimby, owing to his own knowledge of Mrs. Eddy and of his father's manuscripts. Quimby's adherents declare that the provisions made in her offer indicate what her claims would have been if the manuscripts had been given into her hands—as she had already announced that Dr. Quimby's writings were her own—and that the proposition was made with the object of securing possession of the manuscripts.
​In a letter to Mr. A. J. Swartz, a mental healer of Chicago who interested himself in the case, dated February 22, 1838, George A. Quimby explained his position:
Your letter with enclosure at hand. I judge that you offer to defend the memory of my father, the late P. P. Quimby. . . . Please permit me to say that I have no doubt of your kind intention to come to the rescue of my father, but I do not feel that there is the slightest necessity for it. . . . If I were in prison, in solitary confinement for life, I should be too busy to get into any kind of a discussion with Mrs. Eddy.
I have my father's manuscripts in my possession, but will not allow them to be copied nor to go out of my hands. Answering your further inquiries, I have no written article of Mrs. Eddy's in my possession, have never had, nor did my father ever have, nor did she ever leave any with either of us. Neither of us have ever "stolen" any of her writings nor anything else. In fact, we both have been able to make a living without stealing. . . .
Yours truly,
George A. Quimby.
From the history of this controversy, it is evident that, for Mrs. Eddy, there have existed two Phineas P. Quimbys: one the Quimby who was her physician and teacher, who roused her from the fretful discontent of middle-age, and who gave her purpose and aspiration; the other the Quimby who, after the publication of Science and Health, became, in a sense, her rival,—whom she saw as an antagonist threatening to invalidate her claims. If she has been a loser through this controversy, it is not because of what she borrowed from Quimby, but because of her later unwillingness to admit her obligation to him. Had she observed the etiquette of the regular sciences, where personal ambition is subsidiary to a desire for truth, and where discoverers and investigators are scrupulous to acknowledge the sources from which they have obtained help, it would have strengthened rather than weakened her position.
* ↑ Miscellaneous Writings (1897), p. 378.
* ↑ See extract from letter to Mr. W. W. Wright, p. 101 of this chapter.
* ↑ From a manuscript written in 1859.
* ↑ The True History of Mental Science, p. 25.
* ↑ P. 12.
* ↑ Miscellaneous Writings (1897), pp. 379 and 380.
* ↑ For the $300 Mrs. Eddy's students also obtained twelve lessons in the Quimby cure.
* ↑ For further extracts from Mrs. Eddy's letters to Quimby, see Chapter IV.
* ↑ Mrs. Crosby was an expert court stenographer.
* ↑ It will be remembered that the "spirit" friendship of Mrs. Patterson's dead brother, Albert Baker, for Mrs. Crosby, formed a close bond in the friendship of the two women, and that he communicated with Mrs. Crosby through his sister. See Chapter IV.
* ↑ In the early '80's, Edward J. Arens published a pamphlet entitled Old Theology in its Application to the Healing of the Sick; the Redemption of Man from the Bondage of Sin and Death, and His Restoration to an Inheritance of Everlasting Life. In this Arens borrowed liberally, in word and idea, from Science and Health. In 1883 Mrs. Eddy sued Arens for infringement of copyright. Arens said, in defence, that he had not borrowed from Mrs. Eddy, but from the late P. P. Quimby, of Portland, Me. He added that Mrs. Eddy had herself appropriated Quimby's ideas, in other words, that both had drawn their philosophy from the same source. The court decided in Mrs. Eddy's favour, and issued a perpetual injunction restraining Arens from circulating his books. On the strength of this decision Mrs. Eddy and her followers have declared that the United States courts have decided the issue of the Quimby controversy in her favour. There is nothing in this decision contrary to the claims of Quimby's friends. The court, they agree, simply decided that Mrs. Eddy held a valid copyright upon Science and Health and that Arens had violated that copyright. They have never denied either of these facts. They freely admit that Mrs. Eddy wrote Science and Health as it stands, and that she has a property interest in it. They are not discussing legal technicalities, but only the moral issue involved,—which, they add, did not and properly could not, be considered by the court.