Sample of Dr. Quimby's Session
Dr. Quimby was not shy in his assessment of the medical profession. The following paragraph is typical of his attitute toward disease and the contribution the physicians of his day made to worsen conditions for their patients.
"From what I have seen and felt of the mind, I am satisfied that nine-tenths of all the old chronic diseases are the result of wrong impressions produced on the mind of persons by physicians, ignorantly, for I do not want to accuse them of knowingly being the authors of so much misery. These errors do not arise with the country physician so much as in medical colleges where they are used for the purpose of inventing diseases to torment man."
"Diseases are like fashions; and everyone knows that we are all whirled round the wheels of fashion, in a greater or less degree."
"Had there never been a medical book written, advancing new ideas of medicine and disease, surrounded with blind quotations from Greek and Latin lollypop authors, mankind would have been much better off at the present time and subject to some thousands less diseases. There are so many diseases now that it is almost impossible for a person to be sick without having a combination of three or four diseases."
Under the heading A Sample Healing via Dr. Quimby, Dr. Quimby, in his own unique style, wrote what he felt was a typical session with a new patient.
A person with asthma consults Dr. Quimby. He, Dr. Quimby, describes their symptoms satisfactorily [Describing their symptoms means that Dr. Quimby began to physically feel and show all the symptoms of his patient without the patient telling him he had asthma.] So they see he knows something about them. He then says...
| Dr. Quimby: | You are afraid of asthma. |
| The Patient: | I know that I have asthma. I know that my lungs are diseased. |
| Dr. Quimby: | How do you know it? |
| The Patient: | My doctor has pronounced my case asthma. |
| Dr. Quimby: | I say you have no asthma or disease of the lungs. |
| The Patient: | How do you know that? |
| Dr. Quimby: | You will admit that I told you your symptoms in regard to your lungs? |
| The Patient: | Yes. |
| Dr. Quimby: | I only had such symptoms when I sat down by you, and I have no asthma. Why could not you have such symptoms produced in some other way? |
| The Patient: | But I know that my lungs are diseased because I have such pains and suffer so much with my cough, etc. |
| Dr. Quimby: | Have I not taken all your symptoms and did I not cough and raise as you do? |
| The Patient: | Yes, but it is from sympathy. |
| Dr. Quimby: | Well, if I take your symptoms from sympathy, why could not you get these symptoms from sympathy with some other person or idea? |
| The Patient: | Do you think I make all this sickness, or imagine my lungs are diseased? |
| Dr. Quimby: | No. |
| The Patient: | Then why do I have these bad symptoms and cough if I have no disease? Do I imagine them? |
| Dr. Quimby: | No, your symptoms are real, but it is your mind. |
| The Patient: | I have no mind about it. These symptoms come without my mind, for when I sleep, I am still sick. |
| Dr. Quimby: | What is your mind? |
| The Patient: | My thoughts and abilities. |
| Dr. Quimby: | What are your thoughts about yourself? |
| The Patient: | My thoughts are that I have asthma. |
| Dr. Quimby: | Then are you not in your thoughts? |
| The Patient: | I am when I think about myself. |
| Dr. Quimby: | Then are not your thoughts your mind? |
| The Patient: | Yes. |
| Dr. Quimby: | Then is not your disease in your mind? |
| The Patient: | No. |
| Dr. Quimby: | Where is it? |
| The Patient: | In my chest. |
| Dr. Quimby: | How do you know it? |
| The Patient: | By my symptoms. |
| Dr. Quimby: | What are your symptoms? |
| The Patient: | They are my consciousness of suffering. |
| Dr. Quimby: | Is not this consciousness your disease? |
| The Patient: | Yes. |
| Dr. Quimby: | Is not this in your mind? |
| The Patient: | Yes, but I should not have had this consciousness if something did not produce it and how could I ever have got this disease by my mind? |
| Dr. Quimby: | By embracing false ideas and belief and receiving opinions for truth. |
| The Patient: | What false ideas make me cough? |
| Dr. Quimby: | The false idea of consumption which is a humbug. |
| The Patient: | Do you mean to say that asthma does not exist and that people do not die with it? |
| Dr. Quimby: | It exists as much as people believe in it. But it is all a lie. Men worship false
gods but that does not make them true. Public opinion has made asthma and mankind embraces it as true and when it works its way destroying its believers, it says, I am the truth, and death is its proof. I say there is no principle in disease. It is an error that truth can correct. From with a false belief, mankind reason entirely wrong about themselves. The belief will produce a disease which is called upon as a witness to the truth of the very theory that made it. Mankind will never be well or happy until they turn around and change their belief. You believe that there is something in your body independent of yourself that is consuming your frame. All around you are of the same mind. No one, save one, has ever thought differently or said so if they did. What you feel physically is the symptoms or working of this destroyer and to cure you would be to get you out of this belief and make you see the humbug and imposition to which you have been subjected. I say that your physical health is entirely under the laws or operation of the mind and one is the expression of the other. |
| The Patient: | I do not see how this can be, for we see those of strong minds confined to a weak and sickly body. |
| Dr. Quimby: | This may be in some respects. Your mind may be strong and healthy on every subject but
that of health. But if you are sick and locate your trouble in your body, your ideas cannot be right about yourself. Flesh and blood cannot originate disease, but they carry it on, being formed in the mind. You think that a vital power exists in your body independent of your mind, which works the machinery of your pains, creating disease, and finally exhausting itself in death do you not? |
| The Patient: | I have every reason to believe that my vital powers are declining under a wasting disease and the condition of my lungs will testify to this. |
| Dr. Quimby: | You would like to get well? |
| The Patient: | Certainly, if it were possible. |
| Dr. Quimby: | Who says it is impossible? |
| The Patient: | The doctor and all my friends. |
| Dr. Quimby: | How do they know? |
| The Patient: | By my symptoms. |
| Dr. Quimby: | What are your symptoms? |
| The Patient: | All the things I physically feel. |
| Dr. Quimby: | Have I not taken on your symptoms? |
| The Patient: | Yes, but you have no disease. |
| Dr. Quimby: | What should make the difference between us, if we both have the same symptoms and why am I not in asthma and liable to die? |
| The Patient: | I do not know that, but there is the difference of health and disease and I am in danger of dying while your are not. |
| Dr. Quimby: | Are you aware that it is your belief that makes the difference between us? |
| The Patient: | Of course it is and reasonably. |
| Dr. Quimby: | Would you not like to change your belief and be as free from disease as I am? |
| The Patient: | Certainly if my belief affects my health. |
| Dr. Quimby: | Have I not shown you that your disease is in your mind? |
| The Patient: | You have in words, but I do not believe it. You make out a clear case, but I do not see as that has anything to do with my disease. |
| Dr. Quimby: | This is where I shall try to explain to you what I mean. No phenomenon in the natural world ever produced itself and no irregularity, disturbance or disease in the human body ever was self-created. They must be dependent on some cause which being ascertained comes within individual knowlege and experience, but not coming within the cognizance of the bodily senses is left in obscurity. When the trouble becomes apparent in the bodily senses, mankind in their ignorance assume that the cause is in the phenomenon thus giving matter life and creative power. Mankind believes that the life of the body is a separate and independent identity from that of the soul and that its life dies. Whenever they get into trouble, they reason upon this belief. Mesmerism [hypnotism] proves that an individual can act with all his faculties; reason, see, hear, taste, etc. entirely independent of his body. Numberous experiments show how completely a subject's organization is controlled by the belief and affected by the thoughts of the mesmerizer. When a person feels a pain in the side, the first inevitable construction of the world is that something is the matter in the body. My experience teaches me to attend to the mind of the person as connected with it ... not what they are thinking about, but their state of mind whether nervous, anxious, sad or frightened, etc. In detecting this, the idea of their fright or whatever their state of mind might be comes too. If I understand the idea [the lie] which induces their state of mind sufficiently, to convince them or bring them into the same state that I am about it, [in other words what they believe is a lie] then I make a cure. |
| The Patient: | What do you find is the state of my mind? |
| Dr. Quimby: | You are melancholy and afraid of asthmas, and if I succeed in destroying the ideas that imprison you, then you are free. |
| The Patient: | Do you suppose that you can ever convince me that I do not have asthma, when I have such proofs? |
| Dr. Quimby: | Yes! |
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