Physic and Metaphysic in

Nineteenth-Century America: Medical

Sectarians and Religious Healing
CATHERINE L. ALBANESE

Writing in the first issue of The Magnetic and Cold Water Guide in 1846,
an unnamed editor hailed the virtues of the cold-water cure: "Instead of the

dosing and drugging of the old system of practice, it proposes to rely on the
indwelling healing power of nature alone, to provoke and regulate which, it

employs the widespread element of fresh unadulterated water." In case

readers had not caught the full dimensions of the message, the writer inserted

"the testimony of an experienced physician of Massilon, Ohio." The doctor,

an A. Underhill, waxed eloquent on his investigations of "the Water

Treatment of disease" and worked his way to a concluding rhetorical
flourish. "Physiology, Phrenology, and Magnetism," he summarized, "are
the keys that are unlocking the great mysteries of nature and mind, and
letting us in, as it were, to the inner temple, where the sunbeams of light and

truth are filling the minds and understandings of all the truly devout
worshippers of the Eternal principles which govern all things."'

Between them, editor and physician had charted the direction that a
number of Americans would take as the century progressed. Together these
Americans, many of them roughly middle class, would forge and express part
of a popular mentality that deified nature and made it into religion. For them,
nature became a symbolic and salvific center, encircled by a cluster of related

therapeutic beliefs, behaviors, and values. Conformity to nature became a

way of organizing both ordinary and nonordinary aspects of life-and,
especially, the recovery of healthful life. In a culture that was experiencing

the rapid rise of industrialization and an urbanization that uprooted many

from rural life, the healing virtues of nature seemed easy enough to long for.
Research on medical sectarian movements (hydropathy, Thomsonian herbalism, homoeopathy,

osteopathy, and chiropractic) was conducted during the summers of 1982 and 1983 at the
American Antiquarian Society and other specialized libraries, with the aid of a National
Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for Independent Study and Research and a Samuel
Foster Haven Fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society. I am grateful to both the
endowment and the society for their support and assistance. Material in this essay is taken from a

longer study of nature religion in America (in process) in which it appears in another context.
The longer work will discuss themes and concerns that, perforce, are only glanced over here.
1. "Testimony of a Physician to the Benefits of Hydropathy," The Magnetic and Cold Water

Guide 1 (June 1846): 7-8.

Ms. Albanese is professor of religion in Wright State University, Dayton,

Ohio.

489

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490

CHURCH HISTORY

And in a culture that, in however bowdlerized a form, had

republican Enlightenment, the invocation of nature was still su

an aura of patriotism and religion.

In the unsophisticated world of popular mentality, the "

healing nature religion was never precisely defined. However,

of "nature" would prove to be of considerable utility. For some
signify, pure and simple, the physical world, the environment
and within the body-of elements not fashioned by human skil

nature would become an abstract principle in an environm

extruded into the starry skies that it lost the familiar touch o
some, in a related distinction, nature would connote the truly
it would become the illusory outer garment of higher spirit, wh
its (spirit's) way.

What, initially, may be extrapolated from all of this? M

that, whatever its specific form, nature religion brought
theology, a way of viewing penultimates and ultimates that

successful therapeutic experience and also shaped experience wi

ical notions. My essay argues, more, that the mixed ingredient
mentality fostered ambiguity on issues ranging beyond the pr

nature. For, as I shall illustrate, conceptual inconsistency an

through the therapeutic world of nature religion.

Perhaps nowhere was this confusion more striking than in t
mentality linked nature to mind. With the evangelical revival
experiential power of the unseen, the joining of the forces of
forces of mind was not a difficult step. And with mesmerism, S

ism, and (although less important here) Transcendentalism

images of spirit and matter, the step became virtually effortles

doctor from Massilon had shown so well, some Americans

curative powers of nature likewise were celebrating the healin

mind.
1.

Rhetorical flourish was one thing. The theology of nature, for all its
ambiguity, also could provide self-conscious apologetic-something that
water-cure journals delivered in abundance. In a striking example, The
2. Although it may be academic heresy (and certainly a reversal of my own initial assumptions)
to say so, my reading of the sources persuades me that the nearer, more immediate shapers of
natural therapeutics were, first, mesmerism and, then, Swedenborgianism. Not that the

Transcendentalists-and especially Ralph Waldo Emerson with his active lyceum lecture

career-did not share and help to forge the template of ideas behind the religion of nature.

But, in general, the language of healing-and some of the healers-show a more direct
connection with mesmerism and Swedenborgianism. In the final analysis, though, ideas
were "in the air," and causal explanations become unproductive.

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MEDICAL SECTARIANS AND RELIGIOUS HEALING

491

Water-Cure World of Brattleboro, Vermont, declaring its platf

(1860) issue, stated categorically: "We regard Man, in his p

natural condition as the most perfect work of God, and conside

degenerated physical state as only the natural and inevitab

thousands of years of debauchery and excess, of constant and w

sion of his better nature, and the simple penalty of outrage

which is as just and more severe than any other."3

The implications of the proclamation were unpacked f

subsequent issues. Another physician, W.T. Vail, for instan
whether God was "the author of Disease," in an argument th
to many readers. The theory that in some mysterious fash

willed by God and the theory that the sin of Adam and Eve bro
into the world crumbled before Vail's linguistic thrusts. Death

be the natural end of life, not the result of disease, but t

disorganization of form at life's term. "The idea indulged
people that disease grows out of a trangression of the mora

wrote Vail. And yet, disease was the result of transgression. "It
attribute our diseases to the will of the Almighty when it is ob
ourselves are the sole cause of them in the various transgression
have been guilty," Vail continued. "If we eat poisons, and drink

breathe poisons, and medicate with poisons, God will have t

order of his universe or we must have disease; there can be no

"Let us therefore abandon Satan's system of poisoning," he u

it is upon a lie, and working as it does the most disastrous result

and adopt God's system, based on truth-on the harmonies and c

of nature."4
A Christian physiology surely pervaded the analysis.5 But the logic of the
theological language moved beyond the Christian legacy to another gospel. In

the other gospel of the water-cure movement, nature and God (the divine
mind that was source of law and truth) were congruent principles, mutual
and intertwined in the living of life because they were very close to being
identical. Beyond that, the experiential test of virtue was the healthy body,
the body, as water curers would have it, in harmony with all of nature's laws.

It followed that, by joining oneself to the working of these laws, a man or

woman approached-and, drinking tumbler after tumbler of cold water,
3. "Our Platform," The Water-Cure World 1 (April 1860): 5. The Water-Cure World was
edited by C.R. Blackall, again a medical doctor.

4. W.T. Vail, "Origin of Human Diseases," ibid. (May 1860): 10-11; ibid. (July 1860): 27

(emphasis in original).
5. For "Christian physiology," see the discussion in James C. Whorton, Crusadersfor Fitness:
The History of American Health Reformers (Princeton, 1982), pp. 38-61. But Whorton
couches his exposition in terms of the preventive therapeutics of the health-reform movement
rather than the curative tactics of medical sectarianism; and he is especially concerned with
the Christian physiology of Sylvester Graham and William Andrus Alcott.

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CHURCH HISTORY

492

incorporated-God or truth. The everyday virtue of harmo

ritually in the water-cure establishments that sprang up
generation of refugees from the heroic medicine of the era.

to the copious drinking of cold water, the sick under

hydropathic practices. They were packed or rubbed in wet sh

head baths, leg baths, sitting (pelvic) baths, wash tub baths,
and plunge baths; and, in nineteenth-century style, they exp

cataract, and hose baths that were variants on (also-offer

Meanwhile, as they became used to the waters, they obser

regimen of diet and exercise to continue harmonizing their s

such a luxuriant ritual lexicon, individuals had little diffic
focused form, a generalized theology of nature.

Nor was the hydropathic the only enactment. In simil

theology of nature was focused and dramatized in a series of

in many manifestations, understood nature and mind as prim
and the healing act as the expression of virtue through ritual.

followers of Thomsonian herbal healing and homoeopathy

century, osteopathy and chiropractic articulated the pattern.

from this patterned perspective, the inherent integrity o

procedures is highlighted, and their religious rationale

Thus, it is not enough to say that nineteenth-century religio

overtly religious movements, as in the metaphysical systems

and Christian Science. Religious healing included represe

small army of medical sectarians as well-practitioners an
healing expressed their theology of nature and their nature

An article from the Boston Thomsonian Manual in 184

could inveigh against humans by comparing them to the anim

beast that roams the forest in pursuit of his prey, unaide

reason, ungoverned by the dictates of a moral nature, cl

destiny than that of a brief existence in his native wilds, may

consistency, of a more implicit obedience to the laws of Natu

God, than proud Man!" Thomsonian editors Benjamin Co

Webster announced as part of the motto for their own jo
later: "NO POISONING, BLEEDING, BLISTERING, OR PHYSICING-NO SECRET
6. For a brief and useful recent introduction to water cure, see Jane B. Donegan, "Hydropathic

Highway to Health": Women and Water-Cure in Antebellum America, Contributions in

Medical Studies 17 (Westport, Conn., 1986), pp. xi-xx, 3-17, 185-201. Donegan suggests
the upper and middle-class background of institutional patients (p. xiii).
7. Jane Donegan notes that "irregular medical practitioners probably accounted for no more
than ten percent of the total number of nineteenth-century physicians; "Hydropathic
Highway to Health," p. 195. For her source, see George Rosen, The Structure of American
Medical Practice, 1875-1941, ed. Charles E. Rosenberg (Philadelphia, 1983), p. 16. Not all

of Donegan's ten percent-and, especially, their many patients-should be understood as

consciously embracing nature religion. Nonetheless, the metaphysical structure that
supported sectarian therapeutics was based on the religion of nature, even if it also often had

Christian components.

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MEDICAL SECTARIANS AND RELIGIOUS HEALING

493

NOSTRUMS-THE UNITY OF DISEASE, IT BEING AN OBSTRUCTION TO THE FREE

OPERATION OF THE LAWS OF VITALITY-THE USE OF THOSE REMEDIES ONLY,

THAT ACT IN HARMONY WITH NATURE'S LAWS." And the professor and
physician I.M. Comings, in an address that was reprinted in at least two
journals, affirmed that the truths of Thomsonianism had "'existed in the
atmosphere of mind' ever since the world began."8

In 1851, the physician O.A. Woodbury could write for Keene, New

Hampshire's Homoeopathic Advocate and Guide to Health to celebrate the

theories of Samuel Hahnemann, homoeopathy's German founder. Hahne
mann's mind, Woodbury told readers, "became impressed with the grea

truth, that diseases, instead of being produced by a material morbid principle

were 'purely dynamic aberrations, which our spiritual existence undergoes

in its mode of feeling and acting.' " But Hahnemann, perforce, had been
practical man, and now the time had come to ground his practice in theory.

The "laws of life and vitality," or "the laws of our being," supported

Hahnemann's system; and, argued Woodbury, "the doctrines of Homoeopathy arise spontaneously out of them." What were these laws, as Woodbury
understood them? The answer, for one devoted to the naturalistic analysis at

the base of homoeopathic healing (the Law of Similars and the Law o
Infinitesimals), seems not a little surprising:
The mind is the power which produces, in the human body, not only the

intellectual and moral but also the vital phenomana [sic]. As the almighty mind
produces all the wondrous and mysterious workings throughout the material
universe, from the insensible growth of vegetation to the earthquake's shock, and
thence onward to the revolution of distant worlds, ... all in accordance with its
own inherent impressions of love, mercy, justice, goodness, wisdom and truth, so
does the human mind produce in its own little universe, the body, all its varied
phenomena, from the lowest action of vitality to the most powerful physical

motions, and thence upward to the highest grade of intellectual and moral

phenomena.9

Mind, evidently, was all, even though nature was all. And the human
mind, as microcosm of the divine mind, was the source of impressive
creative-and restorative-powers. What had emerged in the language of
Woodbury and the other writers was a reappropriation of the ancient
doctrine of correspondence-of the axiomatic "as above, so below." Th
eighteenth-century visionary theologian Emanuel Swedenborg had revive
and reinterpreted the doctrine in numerous writings, and the new-old
teaching of the Swedish seer spread easily in the popular mentality tha
medical sectarians shared. The contagion of Swedenborg's model no doubt

8. "Dyspepsia and Its Causes" [Letter from J.M.A., to his brother; reprinted from th
Philadelphia Saturday Courier], Boston Thomsonian Manual 9 (1 Dec. 1842): 9; "An
Apology," The Boston Thomsonian Medical and Physiological Journal 1 (15 April 1846)
219 (upper case in original); "Extracts from an Address of Prof. I. M. Comings, M.D.,"
ibid. (15 May 1846): 246.
9. 0. A. Woodbury, "Homoeopathy the Only True Medical Practice," The Homoeopathic
Advocate and Guide to Health 1 (Aug. 1851): 65-66 (emphasis in original).

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CHURCH HISTORY

was augmented by it promulgation, in modified form, by th

Transcendentalists. And the contagion was linked to Swedenb

of a divine influx in the natural world-ideas which, as we shall see,

resembled mesmeric teachings of magnetic tides and fluids. Most important

here, the contagion made available the mingled, spirit-matter dimension of

Swedenborg's thought. For in his copious reports of his visionary experience,
Swedenborg had collapsed the distinction between spirit and matter in ways
that could only encourage a similar indistinction in the popular mentality.'1

By the end of the century, some representatives of osteopathy and

chiropractic were echoing aspects of this earlier assessment as it had been
absorbed into a therapeutic religion of nature. Late-century osteopaths hailed

the machinery of nature and nature's God. From a related perspective, the
Journal of Osteopathy saw "man as a microcosm-a miniature of the cosmic
universe" and hailed the new osteopathic science for its "immovable basis in

nature itself," with "operations... in harmonious accord with the ineradicable and irrepealable laws of nature." Meanwhile, Andrew Taylor Still, the
founder of osteopathy-for a time a magnetic healer and perhaps also a
spiritualist-wrote in his autobiography of the "principle of mind commonly

known as God, which has the power to transpose and transform all
substances." More explicitly than Still, one turn-of-the-century devotee could
speculate that the "healing property" of nature might be "the working of a
divine presiding mind set in closest vicinage to nature, by which the tides of
life, as they ebb and flow within the body, are vivified and purified.""
10. For useful introductions to the thought of Emanuel Swedenborg, see Sig Synnestvedt, ed.
The Essential Swedenborg: Basic Teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist, Philosopher,
and Theologian (New York, 1970), and George Trobridge, Swedenborg: Life and Teaching,
4th ed. (1935; reprint ed., New York, 1962). For Swedenborg's conflation of matter and
spirit, see the typical instances in Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell,

from Things Heard and Seen, trans. J. C. Ager (1852; reprint ed., New York, 1964),
pp. 6-7; The True Christian Religion, Containing the Universal Theology of the New
Church, trans. John C. Ager (1853; reprint ed., New York, 1970), vol. 2, pp. 244-246,
100-101; Swedenborg, Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell, pp. 19, 41, 100-101, 184, 257,
261, 354; Swedenborg, True Christian Religion, 1: 367. And for the classic statement of

correspondence by a New England Transcendentalist, see Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature,

in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson et al., 2 vols.
(Cambridge, Mass., 1971- ), 1: 17-23.
11. "The Scope and Spirit of Osteopathy," Journal of Osteopathy 4 (May 1897): 12; Andrew
Taylor Still, "The Chemicals of Life" [Extracts from the autobiography of Andrew Taylor
Still], ibid. 5 (July 1898): 63 (the Journal of Osteopathy calls Still's autobiography his

"biography"); "Vis Medicatrix Naturae," ibid. 4 (Nov. 1897): 275. For a discussion of

Still's involvement with magnetic healing and his possible spiritualism, see Norman Gevitz,

The D.O.'s: Osteopathic Medicine in America (Baltimore, 1982), pp. 13-14; 156, n. 52.

Still-like D.D. Palmer who, in 1895, founded chiropractic about one hundred miles from
Kirksville, Missouri, in Davenport, Iowa-had earlier advertised himself as a magnetic
doctor. (Still's osteopathy was the older system, begun in 1874.) Nineteenth-century
osteopaths, in general, battled claims that their system was allied with spiritualism. See, for

example, Helen de Lendrecie, "Around the Flag," Journal of Osteopathy 4 (May 1897):

30.

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MEDICAL SECTARIANS AND RELIGIOUS HEALING

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The "tides" of which the disciple spoke evoked mesmeric

tides. Indeed, the mesmeric model-already adumbrated by
"principle of mind" that had "the power to transpose and

pervaded the medical sectarian movements. Mesmeric

explained that an invisible fluid provided the vehicle f

influence between the Heavenly bodies, the Earth and Anim

fluid, permeating all living things, provided a kind of medium

that "the properties of Matter and the Organic Body dep

operation."12 But more important, the presence of the flu
ebb-and-flow pattern guaranteed health and vitality, where
resulted in what we know as illness. Bathed in this fluid (an
atmosphere), humans were always in touch with unseen for

their lives and destinies. Therefore, when illness struck, the m

acted as a kind of hero-priest, using his or her innate anim

alter the flow in the invisible fluid-to unblock obstructionsupply of the life-force could reach the ailing person.
Obstructionist language had surfaced seemingly everyw
medical sectarian movements; and the rhetoric already exa
enough hints. But the language of obstruction to vital tides
especially clear in the theoretical rationale for osteopathy a
To take, now, the case of chiropractic, D.D. Palmer founded
science on the ebb and flow of natural tides that, for him

modulated into mind. As Palmer, the magnetic doctor,

chiropractic, he confided his ideas to his journal in short, s

"Disease, disarrangement, is disturbed harmony," he declar
noted that "mind produces all action, conscious or uncons

"moving thots [sic] produce disease." Thoughts, he deci

substance," modifying all that they touched; and "as the
body."13

By the time he published The Chiropractor's Adjuster in 1910, Palmer was

theorizing that health and illness were caused, respectively, by the free or
impeded movement of "Innate," an energy that flowed through the spinal
column and nervous system of the body. Witnessing to "the identification of

God with Life-Force," he proclaimed his "New Theology," in which Innate

equaled "Universal Intelligence," "Spirit," and "God." "Knowing that our
12. Franz Anton Mesmer, "Dissertation on the Discovery of Animal Magnetism (1779)," in
Mesmerism: A Translation of the Original Scientific and Medical Writings ofF. A. Mesmer,
trans. George Bloch (Los Altos, Calif., 1980), p. 67. For useful discussions of mesmerism,

see Stefan Zweig's account in Mental Healers: Franz Anton Mesmer, Mary Baker Eddy,
Sigmund Freud (1932; reprint ed., New York, 1962), esp. pp. 15-33, in which Zweig notices
a lack of conceptual coherence between the cosmological teaching of planetary influence and
the practical ability of the "animal" magnetist; and see Robert C. Fuller, Mesmerism and
the American Cure of Souls (Philadelphia, 1982).

13. Daniel David Palmer, Journal, as quoted in Vern Gielow, Old Dad Chiro: Biography of
D.D. Palmer, Founder of Chiropractic (Davenport, Iowa, 1981), p. 56.

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physical health and the intellectual progress of Innate (the personified

portion of Universal Intelligence) depend upon the proper alignment of the
sketetal frame, we feel it our bounden duty to replace any displaced bones so
that physical and spiritual health, happiness and the full fruition of earthly
life may be fully enjoyed."14

From hydropathists to chiropractors, the litany of nature and mind

repeated its affirmations through a series of sectarian healing movements.
The affirmations embodied, in fact, as Palmer had said, a "New Theology"
for the times.15 And in keeping with its popular, do-it-yourself quality, the
new theology, as I have already suggested, bore the marks of its origins in the
inconsistencies and confusions it mirrored. On the one hand, the theology of
nature held to a view of matter as "really real," the vital embodiment of Spirit
and God. On the other, the new theology implied that matter was illusion and
unreality, ultimately a trap from which one needed to escape into the realms
of mind. Nature, in other words, might be sacramental, an emblem of divine
things that in some way actually contained the divinity to which it pointed.
And it might therefore have a quality of absoluteness about it. Or, to follow

the logic to a conclusion surely not willingly admitted by those medical

sectarians who embraced nature religion, nature might be the subject of
erroneous perception. It might need continual correction by mind if it were
not paradoxically to become an obstacle on the path to natural-and
spiritual-wholeness.
As this last assessment suggests, confused views of matter went hand and
hand with ambivalent programs for action. If nature was, indeed, real and
sacramental, then corresponding to it became paramount. Harmony with
nature became the broad highway to virtuous living and, more, to union with
divinity. One discovered what was permanent and lasting precisely by
identifying with the regular tides of nature's flux. If, however, nature was at
best a passing show, a foil to obscure the Absolute behind and beyond it,
seeking the enduring truth of Mind became key. Mastery over nature
through mental power became the avenue to a "salvation" that transcended,
even as it managed, nature.

14. D.D. Palmer, The Chiropractor's Adjuster: Text-book of the Science, Art and Philosophy of

Chiropractic (Portland, Ore., 1910; reprint ed., 1966), pp. 446, 542, 399. (No place of
publication is supplied for the reprint, which was reproduced privately in facsimile by David
D. Palmer.) For further discussion of D.D. Palmer and chiropractic germane to this essay,
see Catherine L. Albanese, "The Poetics of Healing: Root Metaphors and Rituals in

Nineteenth-Century America," Soundings 63 (Winter 1980): 390-394.

15. Here and elsewhere I use the term "New Theology" advisedly, since the medical sectarians
were, of course, simply rearticulating elements of the Western occult-metaphysical tradition.

See, for example, Daniel P. Walker, The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism
from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, 1972).

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MEDICAL SECTARIANS AND RELIGIOUS HEALING

2.

As some of the medical sectarians, in a series of alternative healing

movements, were subtly or unsubtly marrying nature to mind, the birth of

metaphysical religion in nineteenth-century America ought not to seem

surprising. With an American culture that, even in the middle years of the
nineteenth century, "stressed Mind-Mind raised to the level of divinity,"16
the early mentalistic manifestations of what became New Thought almost
suggest the commonplace. However, what may appear thoroughly surprising

is that the New Thought movement (and, beside it, even in part Christian
Science) from its side also expressed forms of the theology of nature.

To understand what this statement may mean, we need a longer look at

American metaphysical religion. And there is no better way to gain a sense of
its presence than to turn to its embryonic stages in the life and teachings of

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby. A medical sectarian by his own accounting,

Quimby gave the metaphysical movement an identifiable leader and, with his
amateur theology, profoundly influenced a generation of disciples. Indeed, in

Portland, Maine, before his death in 1866, he was doctor and teacher to
metaphysical leaders ranging from New Thought's Warren Felt Evans and
Julius and Annetta Dresser to Christian Science's Mary Baker Eddy.
Although Quimby had been engaged in the practice of spiritual healing for
the twenty-five years prior to his death, he had begun as a clockmaker and

then became a stage performer in a demonstration of clairvoyance in

healing.17 Traveling the lyceum circuit with an inquiring and critical mind,

he had pondered how his healing partner, Lucius Burkmar, when magnetized to reach a trance state, could diagnose and prescribe accurately for
illness. Quimby became convinced that the real agent of Burkmar's knowl-

edge and each would-be patient's cure was the mental process in the
individual or group involved. Burkmar read, not merely the ailment, but,
more, people's beliefs about it. Burkmar's cures worked because of the power
of suggestion.
Then, in the midst of a continuing effort to test and try his conclusions,

Quimby discovered his own clairvoyant abilities. He parted ways with

Burkmar to set up an independent healing practice. As the practice evolved,
Quimby used what worked, whatever its metaphysical implications. Thus,
sometimes he talked to patients, believing his explanations of their diseased
16. Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875 (New
York, 1980), p. 134.
17. The best near-contemporary summaries of Phineas P. Quimby's life and thought, by a
partisan, may be found in Horatio W. Dresser, ed., The Quimby Manuscripts (1921; reprint

ed., Secaucus, N.J., 1969), and Horatio W. Dresser, Health and the Inner Life: An

Analytical and Historical Study of Spiritual Healing Theories, with an Account of the Life
and Teachings of P. P. Quimby (New York, 1906).

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498

conditions would cure them as they perceived their false

brought physical nature into harmony with its spiritual princi

times, Quimby used his personal power, directing weaker pa

mental force that channeled energy to heal. As he used this
Quimby worked from a theoretical model which, like D.D.
further and further away from its mesmeric roots-but ye
connection.

In his writings, Quimby had explained his early success in entrancing

Burkmar by his ability to manipulate magnetic fluid; and he never forgot the

magnetic cosmology. Assuredly, he moved into what should properly be

called mental healing, but his explanation of disease and cure retained
something of the mesmeric model. The power of the magnetic theory as a
means of imaging the mysterious process of sickness and health continued to

persuade in new ways. Thus, in writings that bear all the marks of their
roughshod construction, Quimby hammered out a confused, but still commanding, theology of healing, forming a charter document for American
metaphysical religion.

Take, for example, his sometime reflections of the "odor" of illness. In a

series of remarkable references, Quimby linked the invisible substance that

was altered in the magnetic state to the odor, or "atmosphere," of disease.

"Now where and what was this invisible something that could pass in and out
of matter?" he asked of mesmerism and clairvoyance. He thought the answer

required going back to the "First Cause," "back of language," and he found
there the primacy of the sense of smell for attracting human and beast to food.

It was only a small jump for Quimby from the sense of smell to the power of

speech. "The sense of smell, " he argued, was "the foundation of language,"
and "as language was introduced the sense of smell became more blunt till
like other instincts it gave way to another standard." Thinking, it followed,

"came to be as much of a sense as smelling." Hence, when Quimby

confronted disease, he was able to diagnose by a process akin to smelling.18

The associative links he had pointed toward, however imprecisely, were

still clear. Magnetic fluid, as invisible attractive force, was like odor, which
was also an invisible attractive force. And similarly, thought, an evolved and
added human sense, was also like odor in being an invisible attractive force.

"To every disease there is an odor, [mental atmosphere]," wrote Quimby,

"and every one is affected by it when it comes within his consciousness."19

Elsewhere Quimby escalated even more. The magnetic fluid-the lifeforce-must by implication be the living power of God upholding the
creation. God was "the great mesmeriser or magnet," who spoke "man or the
18. Phineas P. Quimby, in Dresser, Quimby Manuscripts, pp. 253-255. Quimby's writings in
the Manuscripts date mostly from 1859 to 1865.
19. Ibid., p. 258 (brackets in Dresser text).

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MEDICAL SECTARIANS AND RELIGIOUS HEALING

499

idea into existence." And odor assumed still greater meaning

with "Wisdom."

Now suppose that man calls Wisdom the First Cause, and that from this Wisdom

there issues forth an essence that fills all space, like the odor of a rose. This

essence, like the odor, contains the character or wisdom of its father, or author,
and man's wisdom wants a name given to it, so man calls this essence God. Then
you have wisdom manifest in God or the essence, then this essence would be called
the Son of Wisdom. Then Wisdom said, "let us create matter or mind or man in
our image," or in the likeness of this essence of God. So they formed man out of
the odor called matter or dust, that rises from the grosser matter, and breathed
into him the living essence, or God, and the matter took the form of man.20

Quimby had moved from magnetism to mind. His homespun theology had

provided a muddled link between matter and spirit, achieving through the
metaphor of odor a cohesion that hid as much as it revealed. Like some
medical sectarians who were celebrating nature but still exalting mind,
Quimby was having things both ways and any way he liked. In fact, as he
explained elsewhere, like Wisdom (or Truth) error was "an element or
odor." And since, as he also said, "the minds of individuals mingle like
atmospheres," it was clearly easy for error, like a noxious magnetic fluid, to
spread.21
Quimby's ability for original synthesis did not stop with his reappropria-

tion of the theories of Franz Anton Mesmer. His writings also suggest his
acquaintance with the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg.22 Thus, Swedenborg's doctrine of correspondence was not unlike the correspondence between
mind and body that grounded Quimby's understanding of illness. Moreover,

Swedenborg's "divine influx," complementing Mesmer's invisible fluid,

could easily, if unconsciously, be incorporated into the thinking of the former

magnetic healer. And Swedenborg's collapse of the matter-spirit distinction

was echoed in Quimby's version of "spiritual matter." It was in fact here, at

the heart of his understanding of his healing practice, that Quimby

bequeathed to his followers an ambiguity as thorough as Swedenborg's-and
the medical sectarians'-had been.23

In his autobiographical reminiscences relating his work with Lucius

20. Ibid., pp. 175, 335-336.
21. Ibid., pp. 299, 414.
22. Neither in this case nor in the case of Mesmer can we surmise that Quimby had firsthand
knowledge. But certainly, at least through his patient and student Warren Felt Evans, who
had left the Methodist ministry for the Swedenborgian New Church, he would have come to

know major Swedenborgian themes. Horatio Dresser, however, vigorously denied any
Swedenborgian influence on Quimby, although he cited one reference to Swedenborg in
Quimby's lecture notes (see Dresser, Quimby Manuscripts, pp. 18, 56-57).
23. For Quimby's use of the idea of correspondence, see, for example, Quimby Manuscripts,
pp. 263, 313, 267. Gail Thain Parker thought that "Swedenborg's definition of 'influx' was
invaluable" to mind curists; Parker, Mind Cure in New England: From the Civil War to
World War I (Hanover, N.H., 1973), p. 42.

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500

CHURCH HISTORY

Burkmar, Quimby owned that he thought of "mind" as "

could be changed." What followed for him is somewhat startl

[mind] spiritual matter, because I found it could be condensed

receive a name called "tumor,' and by the same power u

direction it might be dissolved and made to disappear."24

Not to be identified with the First Cause, mind was ma

thought. Therefore, disease was "what follows the disturbanc

spiritual matter." Or, in an inverted expression of the sa

came from the "spiritual body," while mind was "the spir

receives the seed of Wisdom, and also the seeds of the wisdom

reason." "Disease is the fruit of the latter," he went on, expla

"the application of the wisdom of God or Science is the cleari

rubbish that springs up in the soil or mind." These affirmati

for Quimby there was something-First Cause, Wisdom,

many of his references)-that lay beyond even spiritual matte

the case of the other medical sectarians, matter shaded off int

and the inexpressible took on the contours of idealism.

"spiritual matter," Quimby thought the body "nothing bu

condensed into what is called matter, or ignorance of God or

Hence, there is no avoiding the equivocality of the tea

equivocality dissolves into a total mixing of models when

ethical practice that emerged from Quimby's thought. Put br

was advising, in clear and direct terms, the application of min

was by destroying "error" in the "truth" that he would b

brushing away opinion and belief with true knowledge th
come. Yet when Quimby spoke about what he advised, h

without apology with laws of sympathy and harmony that e

model. Consider, for example, this demonstration of th

Quimby's logic: "Now as our belief or disease is made up of

[spiritual] matter, it is necessary to know what beliefs we ar

the disease is to correct the error, and as disease is what f

destroy the cause, and the effect will cease. How can th

knowledge of the law of harmony."26

In short, Quimby had shown that there was no difference, f

harmonizing and being in charge. He had proclaimed

message of the moral life as the cohort of medical sectarians

powers of nature. The doctor from Portland mingled in

atmosphere" because he had constructed an analogously f
24. Quimby, in Dresser, Quimby Manuscripts, p. 61.

25. Ibid., pp. 180, 213-214, 272, 118. For "spiritual matter," see also
pp. 227, 231,235, 246, 334.

26. Ibid., p. 186 (brackets in Dresser text).

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MEDICAL SECTARIANS AND RELIGIOUS HEALING

501

he was caught in the same conceptual ambiguity concernin

nature that was theirs. Leaning hard on the idealist side of

Quimby had yet managed to turn in a decidedly phys

metaphysical reality; and he had managed a similar confu

harmony with nature and control by mind, in his ethical m
religion, like the religion of certain other medical sectarian
the crack: it was still a species of nature religion.

In time, of course, the ambiguousness, even panentheism

theology became less fashionable. New Thoughters cultivate

consistently, as surely as they found ways to transform the m

with Truth. Still, something of Quimby's "vapor" remain

with the vapors of medical sectarians-and New Thought co
in some measure inconsistently, in the breach.27
3.

It remained for Mary Baker Eddy, former Quimbyian patient and student,
to achieve the greatest clarity regarding matter and mind, given the inconsis-

tencies of the heritage. As the religion of Christian Science testifies, Eddy

pushed the idealist cosmology as far as it would go. But even the founder of

Christian Science could not escape totally the allure of nature. Once, in a
poem, she had solemnly addressed an oak on a mountaintop:
Oh, mountain monarch, at whose feet I stand,Clouds to adorn thy brow, skies clasp thy hand,Nature divine, in harmony profound,
With peaceful presence hath begirt thee round.

In the first edition of her textbook Science and Health (1875), Eddy could
own her belief that "man epitomizes the universe, and is the body of God."
And she could repudiate "mortal man" as "a very unnatural image and
likeness of God, immortality," while metaphors of harmonizing and governing chased each other in her pages. A decade later she could still tell her
followers that Jesus "was a natural and divine scientist."28
Even at the pinnacle of Eddy's authorial career, as she taught that matter
was a false belief and the error of "mortal man," the final, authoritative
edition of Science and Health separated nature from matter and found ways
to speak admiringly of the former. "The legitimate and only possible action of
27. The best study of the New Thought movement is still Charles S. Braden, Spirits in
Rebellion: The Rise and Development of New Thought (Dallas, 1963).

28. Mary Baker Eddy, "The Oak on the Mountain's Summit," in Mary Baker Eddy,

Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 (Boston, 1896), p. 392; Mary Baker Glover [Eddy],
Science and Health (1875; reprint ed., Freehold, N.J., n.d.), pp. 229, 225 (emphasis mine).
For metaphors of harmonizing and governing, see, for example, [Eddy], Science and Health
(1875), pp. 295, 330, 339; and for the characterization of Jesus, see Mary Baker G. Eddy,
Historical Sketch of Metaphysical Healing (1885; reprint ed., New York, n.d.), p. 8.

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502

CHURCH

Truth

is

the

HISTORY

production

of Spirit."29

However inconclusively, Mary Baker Eddy had shown that the theology of
nature could be inverted to coexist with the denial of matter. Idealism did not

do away with nature: it simply killed nature's body. Matter had been
outlawed, the passing show declared an error, but nature, even in its bodiless

state, remained inescapably linked to mind. In sum, from hydropathists to

mental healers, nineteenth-century physic and metaphysic showed striking

points of connection and overlap. Healing language and ritual suggested

considerably more in common than a mutual interest in curing disease.
29. Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (Boston, 1906), p. 183.

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