Animal Magnetism and the Mother of Christian Science

In the forty-four years (1866-1910) that Mary Anne Morse Baker Glover Patterson Eddy devoted to erecting the system and the church of mental therapy, which she named Christian Science, she never had a favorable word for the method of hypnotic healing to which she owed her start.

Phineas Quimby, however, acknowledged his gratitude for the pioneer work and doctrine of Anton Mesmer. Quimby practiced Mesmeric manipulation of the ill who came to him for help until he discovered that it was possible to heal by suggestion from a distance, by what he termed “absent treatment.” Finally he parted company with Mesmerism in theory as well as action; he decided that the source of his clients' distress lay in their materialist conception of the body's welfare and woe. To Quimby their trouble was a stubborn belief in the flesh, which he came to feel he had unconsciously nourished with his Mesmerian “electrical psychology,” his own faith in the biophysical force named by the Austrian physician, “Animal Magnetism.” In the new transference technic developed by Quimby he strove to cure, not by transmitting to sick minds the physical fortification of his own mind's health, but by convincing them that some falsehood in their thought had made them ill. Disease, he taught, “is the work of the devil or error.”1

At first Mrs. Eddy adopted this opinion and hailed the humble