Marketplace of the Marvelous (28 page)

Other regulars questioned mesmerism's healing claims. They charged magnetizers with overstatement and deception for making extravagant claims about unseen and unknown forces to dupe the witless. They accused patients of faking trances to gain access to free medical care or of actually being hired actors. The patient's “grimaces, manipulations, and jargon of words is all a farce to deceive the ignorant . . . hoaxed out of much small change, at the expense of their wit.”
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To combat these accusations and make the case for the seriousness
of their science, American mesmerists offered detailed neurophysiological observations and made hypotheses based on contemporary medical knowledge. Mesmerist John Bovee Dods suggested that the body breathed in animal magnetism from the air and transformed it into vital fluid for human use. Several mesmerists proposed that animal magnetism took the form of electrical impulses when it entered the nervous system. Others suggested that the brain exuded animal magnetism. All were convinced that science would eventually account for this new and wholly unexplored autonomous psychological realm. Aware of the power of suggestion and expectation in determining behavior, mesmerists became the first Americans to directly study the psychodynamics of interpersonal relationships. Most mesmerists accepted that suggestion and prior expectation affected the patient's susceptibility to trance, but they, like Puységur before them, did not believe that this could account for all of their data. Subjects in the highest mesmeric state reported feeling a distinct, and in some cases, tangible force emanating from their nervous systems. Afterward, most could not remember the details of the trance experience, but many clearly recalled feeling something inside them moving around. For mesmerists, the physical existence of animal magnetism seemed undeniable based on their data. Many believed it also gave their theory greater significance because it proposed both a new psychological realm as well as a new natural force in the universe. Mesmerists promoting even the most psychological versions of their method never abandoned the idea of an invisible fluid. This commitment to animal magnetism distinguished mesmerism from opposing theories and other mental cures. As a result, American mesmerists were not as interested in pursuing the notion of suggestion as some European scientists, such as neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his student Sigmund Freud, would be later in the nineteenth century. Charcot found aspects of mesmeric trance useful in treating certain psychiatric patients, while Freud used hypnosis in his career to recover repressed memories. But until then, mesmerist articles and charts in the 1840s and 1850s represented some of the most significant attempts of the period to explore the nature of consciousness and the mind-body connection.
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Almost as abruptly as he arrived, Poyen left the United States and returned to France in 1839. But by then, the movement he spawned
had developed a life of its own. Both P. T. Barnum's American Museum and Ruben Peale's New York Museum of Natural History and Science drew crowds at twice-daily demonstrations of mesmerism and clairvoyant somnambulism that combined, like the museums themselves, sensational and over-the-top entertainment with education. Competition grew so fierce between the two museums that each actively poached popular magnetizers from the other with the timeworn lure of higher pay and greater prestige.
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Outside of cities, small-town and rural Americans relied on traveling mesmerists to provide them with medical instruction and entertainment. These itinerants tried to make a career out of demonstrating their mesmeric skills to fellow Americans.

These public displays injected mesmerism into the lives of the American lower and middle classes. Mesmerism, not unlike its fellow irregular healing systems, provided one answer to a growing popular demand for new and more satisfying worldviews outside of religion. Exploring the unconscious mind and the mind-brain connection through trance states allowed Americans to learn about themselves and their true nature outside the walls of the churchyard.
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Followers believed, or certainly hoped, that mesmerism was not a hoax, but a healing tool with real scientific and therapeutic benefit.

One of these Americans was Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, who expanded mesmerist philosophy into a total philosophy of life. A clockmaker by trade, Quimby sat spellbound in the audience as Poyen demonstrated the astonishing powers of animal magnetism on a stop in Belfast, Maine, in 1838. After the lecture, Quimby nearly assaulted Poyen with questions about this mysterious mental fluid. Poyen told Quimby that he, too, could develop his own mental powers if he devoted himself to its study. It was all Quimby needed to hear. He set aside his clocks and followed Poyen from town to town until he mastered the practice of mesmerism. His dedication prompted Poyen to compliment his “exceptional magnetic powers and great power of concentration.”
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Before long, Quimby had a magnetic practice of his own back in Belfast.

Quimby soon joined forces with Lucius Burkmar, a young man particularly adept at mind reading and clairvoyance while under a mesmeric trance. Once magnetized, Quimby directed Burkmar to use his clairvoyant powers to diagnose illnesses in patients and prescribe
medicinal remedies. At other times, Quimby dispensed with Burkmar and instead transmitted the magnetic energy from his own brain into his patient's body. The two took to the road in 1843, providing demonstrations and enacting miraculous cures. Newspapers took note, and soon the former clockmaker from Maine was being touted as the world's leading mesmerist.
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As time passed, though, Quimby began to doubt that animal magnetism alone could explain his healing successes. The startling accuracy of the diagnoses that Burkmar produced so amazed patients that they tended to put their full trust in the curative power of Quimby and Burkmar. But Quimby wondered if the remedies worked more on what the patient believed about her disorder than on what actually ailed her. Was Burkmar simply using his telepathic skills to read the patient's mind rather than to diagnose the actual physical illness? Was he perceiving what the patient already supposed about the illness and simply providing confirmation of that thought? Most of the remedies Quimby prescribed were innocuous enough substances to prove equally effective (or ineffective) on any number of diseases, so it was hard to know what actually did the healing.
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Quimby's speculations about Burkmar led him to a radical conclusion: rather than suppose that what a person believed contributed to healing, Quimby determined that the patients' beliefs were actually the cause of all their symptoms. This idea bears much in common with what are now known as somatoform (or psychosomatic) disorders, where physical symptoms result from psychological causes. Quimby, however, felt that this was the origin of most, if not all, disease.
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Starting from the assumption that the human mind comprised all beliefs, Quimby rationalized that if a person is “deceived into a belief that he has, or is liable to have a disease, the belief is catching and the effects follow from it.”
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Quimby wasn't the first mesmerist to suggest a psychological origin for disease, but unlike his predecessors who pointed to a magnetic fluid imbalance as the primary problem, Quimby specifically identified faulty ideas as the main cause of disease. “All sickness is in the mind of belief,” proclaimed Quimby. “To cure the disease is to correct the error, destroy the cause, and the effect will cease.”
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His theories moved mesmerism one step closer to clinical psychology.

Before Quimby, neither regular doctors nor mesmerists were really
prepared to deal with problems that did not have an obvious physical cause. Doctors were uncomfortable with diseases that lacked a discrete, material, and easily explained origin. Without an understanding of their basis or the presumption that they even existed, the pain and discomfort of mental health issues and symptoms of psychological origin rarely received the social recognition that would grant these illnesses legitimacy. Mental and emotional disorders tended to be classified as ephemeral or hypochondriacal, so most Americans could find little consideration or relief for mental health issues. Quimby, on the other hand, based on his new theory of disease, expanded the scope of the mesmeric cure to provide the support patients needed to constructively manage life's difficulties. He still believed strongly in animal magnetism, which he thought flowed to the nervous system and conscious mind from some deeper, unconscious part of the mind that he believed existed as an actual physical place, but he now assigned human beliefs to a new interventionist role as control valves or power switches regulating the flow of magnetism from the conscious to the unconscious mind. Wrong beliefs could block this flow and disrupt the body's internal harmony by placing it solely at the mercy of outside conditions. Deprived of these essential energies, patients eventually lapsed into disease. The healer's job was to engage with clients on a one-on-one basis to overcome their negative and self-defeating attitudes, a proto–talk therapy. This discussion allowed the healer to identify the wrong beliefs that were causing the outward symptoms and to then heal the patient with new, more positive thoughts. Armed with his new mentalistic theory of disease, Quimby no longer needed Burkmar or any clairvoyant, and the two parted ways in 1847.
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Quimby instructed patients to “come with me [mentally] to where the trouble is, and you will find . . . it is kept hot and disturbed by your mind being misrepresented.”
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His treatment consisted of a combination of straightforward mesmerist technique and a self-induced altered state of consciousness. In this state, Quimby claimed he could see a kind of vapor cloud enveloping his patient's body, similar to an aura, that contained all of her “ideas, right and wrong. This vapor or fluid contains the identity of the person.”
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He could see events long forgotten and, presaging Freud, suppressed opinions and feelings contained in this mental fog. While in this superior mental state, Quimby engaged with the cloud to transmit his mesmerically acquired healing
forces telepathically from his own person to the patient. He used this force to instill faith in the patient that she was healthy and that any negative thoughts were wrong.
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Quimby described his treatment process when he visited a Mr. Robinson who had been confined to his bed for four years. He explained how he'd take up Robinson's feelings “one by one, like a lawyer examining witnesses, analyzing them and showing him that he put false constructions on all his feelings.” Robinson was skeptical of Quimby at first but allowed him to proceed, his arguments being “so plain that it was impossible not to understand.” By the end of the session, Robinson “felt like a man who had been confined in a prison for life” who had just been given “a pardon” and “set at liberty.” The next day, he felt better than he had in years and “had no desire to take to [his] bed” again.
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Quimby's skill and method proved so powerful that he even treated people through the mail. In this “absent treatment,” Quimby professed to be present for the patient in spirit through the written word.
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Quimby's mind cure had an appealing simplicity about it, even as the explanations he offered for his healing powers often defied reason and skirted the edges of the fantastic. Describing his mesmeric state, Quimby claimed to travel into the “land of darkness with the light of liberty, [to] search out the dungeons where the lives of the sick are bound, enter them and set the prisoners free.”
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He couldn't explain his powers; he knew only that they worked. When offered one thousand dollars for his secret, he was forced to confess, “I don't understand it myself.”
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His willingness to admit that he did not know everything was a far cry from other irregular healers, who tended to lash out at those who asked too many questions or required clarification. Right beliefs led to health and happiness. Human misery resulted from listening only to the outward world and losing touch with the body's inner mind and spiritual self. The key element, Quimby counseled, was to identify internal rather than external reference points of self-esteem and worth, a message so modern and familiar as to not seem out of place in any women's magazine or self-help book today. “Disease is something made by belief or forced upon us by our parents or public opinion,” wrote Quimby. “Now if you can face the error and argue it down you can cure the sick.”
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Listen to your inner voice. Don't let other people distract you from the life you were meant
to live. Quimby was the Oprah of the nineteenth century.

In case anyone questioned the religious implications of his theory as they had of mesmerism, Quimby made sure to spell it out. His “Science of Health” reunited the wrong-thinking mind with the divine internal spirit of Christ. Quimby asserted that he established inner rapport with the Christ-like spirit contained inside every person when he healed. Quimby's mesmerist psychology seemed to verify a common belief that humans possessed both a lower animal nature and higher spiritual nature. Phrenologists also made this distinction by locating the traits associated with animals in the lower part of the brain and the more religious and moral faculties in the lobes. By turning the mind inward toward its own psychic depths and God's emanative powers, people could grasp the true purpose of their lives in the physical world; under Quimby, mesmerism now offered a way to conceptualize a theological viewpoint in psychological terms. The mind-cure approach to well-being decreed that everyone had power over their own psychological realm, even if modern life had seemingly stripped away every other aspect of control. Quimby's cure presented both a Christian and scientific approach to life that many nineteenth-century Americans wanted and that he occasionally referred to as “Christian Science.”
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