New Thought · 1802-1866
Phineas Parkhurst Quimby
Phineas Parkhurst Quimby is the founder of the New Thought movement - a self-taught clockmaker and healer who discovered that illness is maintained by belief and healed by changing it. Every author in this collection traces back to him, directly or indirectly. He healed thousands of patients in Portland, Maine before his death in 1866, among them Mary Baker Eddy, whose Christian Science drew heavily from his work.
About Phineas Parkhurst Quimby
Who was Phineas Parkhurst Quimby?
Phineas Parkhurst Quimby was born in 1802 in Lebanon, New Hampshire, and raised in Belfast, Maine, where he worked as a clockmaker and inventor with little formal education. His entry into healing began when he witnessed a demonstration of mesmerism by Charles Poyen in the 1830s and became fascinated by the results. He spent years as a mesmerist, travelling with a hypnotic subject named Lucius Burkmar who appeared to diagnose illness while in trance. The critical observation came when Quimby noticed that Burkmar's prescribed treatments - often substances with no pharmacological value - produced real cures when the patient believed in them.
He concluded that mesmerism had nothing to do with it. The magnetic fluid the mesmerists postulated was not the active agent. The patient's belief was. He abandoned Burkmar and the trance apparatus entirely, and developed a practice built entirely on changing the patient's belief about their illness through direct conversation. By the 1850s he was practising in Portland, Maine, to such demand that he saw hundreds of patients per year. His waiting list stretched months. Among those he healed was a semi-invalid named Mary Baker Patterson, later Mary Baker Eddy, who subsequently founded Christian Science - taking, her critics argued, Quimby's ideas without full attribution.
Quimby never published a book in his lifetime, keeping his ideas in manuscripts and letters that he shared with patients and students. After his death in 1866, his ideas spread primarily through the students he had influenced - Warren Felt Evans, who wrote the first New Thought books; Julius Dresser and Annetta Dresser, who defended his legacy against Mary Baker Eddy's claims of original revelation; and their son Horatio Dresser, who edited and published The Quimby Manuscripts in 1921, finally making the founder's own words accessible.
The Dream.Align.Rewire reading of Quimby begins with his foundational claim: 'The explanation is the cure.' When a patient understood why their belief was producing their symptoms - when the mental cause became conscious - the physical effect began to dissolve. This is the cognitive model in its earliest form, and it anticipates everything that followed: Aaron Beck's cognitive triad, NLP's belief-change protocols, the somatic therapies that work on the body-held beliefs Quimby could not yet name. He was the first person in the Western tradition to treat illness as a belief system rather than a physical fact - and every New Thought author in this collection is, directly or indirectly, building on that foundation.
The Dream.Align.Rewire Perspective
The neuroscience behind Quimby's teaching
Quimby discovered the psychosomatic mechanism a century before psychoneuroimmunology gave it a name: the body responds to belief as if the belief were physical reality. His healing method was essentially a cognitive-somatic intervention - he would sit with a patient, explain the erroneous belief underlying their illness, and describe the spiritual reality that contradicted it. Patients reported an immediate physical sensation of relief during these sessions. This is a description of vagal co-regulation: a regulated, confident nervous system communicating safety to a dysregulated one through the social nervous system. His core principle - 'the explanation is the cure' - is the cognitive model in its earliest form: changing the belief changes the physiological state.
Who This Is For
You'll get the most from Quimby's work if…
- ✓You want to understand where the entire New Thought movement actually came from
- ✓You are interested in the original psychosomatic insight before it was filtered through religious or metaphysical language
- ✓You want to see how clearly the belief-illness connection was understood in the 1850s
- ✓You are studying the history of mind-body medicine and want the founding text
- ✓You are curious about the Quimby-Mary Baker Eddy controversy and what really happened
- ✓You want to trace the lineage from Quimby through to every other author on this page
Key Work
The Quimby Manuscripts
First published 1921
The posthumous collection of Quimby's papers, letters, and essays edited by Horatio Dresser - the only way to read the founder of New Thought in his own words. Essential for understanding where every idea in this tradition originated, and for seeing how clearly Quimby identified the belief-illness connection over a century before psychoneuroimmunology confirmed it.
See workbooks & tools →The Annotated Edition
Read the original - with Christie's annotations
Christie L. Russell's annotated edition of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby's key works adds the neuroscience, NLP, and CBT commentary that places each passage in its modern context - making century-old wisdom immediately actionable.
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