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86 boil on the back of the neck became a toothache at his suggestion. He rubbed the heads of his patients and otherwise manipulated their bodies, believing in his personal magnetism as the important part of the curative agency.

In relieving the sick of their pains he found that he took their conditions upon himself, and he often related how he had to go into his garden and hoe vigorously, or to his woodpile and saw wood most industriously, to get rid of rheumatic pains or agues, and to reestablish his own equilibrium and recharge himself with electric currents; for Quimby was never all his life rid of the theories of Dods relating to the transmission of human electricity. Quimby is said to have cured cases of chronic disease of long standing and to have secured a worthier reputation than when working wonders with Lucius Burkmar. He now began to travel about New England again and issued circulars advertising himself far and wide as a healer with a new theory. Avidity for the mysterious in the rural mind carried these circulars to the remotest hamlets. A curious account of his statements as to himself and his methods appeared in the Bangor Jeffersonian in 1857. It was headed, “A New Doctrine of Health and Disease,” and it said in part:

A gentleman of Belfast, Dr. Phineas P. Quimby, who was remarkably successful as an experimenter in mesmerism some sixteen years ago, and has continued his investigations in psychology, has discovered and in his daily practise carries out, a new principle in the treatment of disease.