Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/399

Rh Quimby, returned from California, and began to practise Quimby's method of mental healing in Boston.

With Mr. Dresser's return the "Quimby controversy" 5 began. In a letter to the Boston Post, February 24, 1883, Mr. Dresser presented evidence which went a great way toward proving that Mrs. Eddy got her principle of mind-healing from his old teacher. He published the laudatory article upon Quimby which Mrs. Eddy had written and printed in the Portland Courier twenty-five years before. He republished Mrs. Eddy's poem, "Lines upon the Death of Dr. P. P. Quimby, who Healed with the Truth that Christ Taught," as well as the letter which Mrs. Eddy wrote him after her memorable fall in Lynn.

To these unguarded utterances of that long-forgotten woman, Mary M. Patterson, Mrs. Eddy replied by repudiating her own effusions, prose and verse, and saying that if she ever wrote them at all she was "mesmerised" when she did it; that Quimby was an ignorant mesmerist, etc.

In 1887 Mr. Dresser published his pamphlet, The True History of Mental Science, in which he repeated his statements in the Boston Post, and related his own experience with Mrs. Eddy when she was a patient and he was a student of Dr. Quimby in Portland. This pamphlet brought out comment that was unfavourable to Mrs. Eddy, and stirred up her disaffected students. Although Mrs. Eddy responded with fire and spirit to her critics, her controversy with Mr. Dresser