“Think Positive”

Janik, Erika. “Think Positive.” American History 49, no. 1 (2014): 50-57

Janik’s article is not a scholarly work because no sources are cited, but it provides an engaging introduction to the history and evolution of mesmerism. She traces the “long and potent path of mental cures and magnetic fluids,” (54) beginning with Franz Mesmer’s late 18^th-century theories on animal magnetism, leading to de Puysegur’s discovery of hypnotism, to Charles Poyan’s 1830 lecture tour introducing mesmerism and hypnosis to New England, and to a student of Poyan, Phineas Quimby, who promptly began his own mind cure practice. Mary Baker Eddy, first a patient and then under tutelage with Quimby, would eventually break from Quimby to organize her Christian Science movement based on a profound healing of her own from reading the New Testament gospels. Another of Quimby’s patients, Warren Felt Evans, would start up a mind cure practice; and from Evans and others would come the New Thought movement and eventually today’s clinical psychology. See A Story Untold: A History of the Quimby-Eddy Debate by Keith McNeil for an exhaustive study of the nature of the mentor relationship between Eddy and Quimby, and the degree of her indebtedness to him.

(Note: this article is adapted by American History with permission from Marketplace of the Marvelous: The Strange Origins of Modern Medicine, by Erika Janik, published January 7, 2014, by Beacon Press.)

Researchers may be interested in a letter to the editors of American History about this article written by Amy B. Voorhees, “Unraveling Mary Baker Eddy,” that appears on the historynet.com web page,  “Letters from Our Readers.”

ISSN: 1531-1260
PRINT ISSN: 1076-8866

See also annotations:

A New Christian Identity: Christian Science Origins and Experience in American Culture by Amy B. Vorhees

Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls by Robert C. Fuller

“Christian Science and Harmonialism” by Stephen Gottschalk

The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine by Anne Harrington

One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life by Mitch Horowitz

“New Thought’s Prosperity Theology and its Influence on American Ideas of Success” by Dawn Hutchinson

“Harmonialism and Metaphysical Religion” by Paul Eli Ivey

From Mesmer to Christian Science: A Short History of Mental Healing by Frank Podmore

“Christian Science” by John K. Simmons

“New Spirit, New Flesh: The Poetics of Nineteenth-Century Mind-Cures” by Sandra S. Sizer