Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/74

46 so interested him. Discovering that he had mesmeric power, he exercised it upon many of his friends and easily repeated the performance of Poyen and other exhibitors. From becoming their imitator he became their rival, and abandoning his workshop, started out as a professional mesmerist. Among the wonder-workers of the early '40's, "Park" Quimby, as he was popularly called, became pre-eminent. Always considered an original character in his native village, he was now regarded as an outright crank, and was the subject of much amiable jocularity.

In the course of his experiments, Quimby discovered that his most sensitive subject was Lucius Burkmar, a boy about seventeen years old, over whom he had acquired almost unlimited hypnotic control. The two travelled all over New England, performing mesmerics feats that have hardly been duplicated since, everywhere arousing great popular interest, and, in certain quarters, great hostility. Psychic phenomena were then incompletely understood; clergymen preached against mesmerism, or animal magnetism, as the work of the devil,—a revival of ancient witchcraft; while the practical man regarded it as pure fraud. The newspapers frequently vilified Quimby and Burkmar, and they were more than once threatened by mobs.

Then, as now, the public mind associated the occult sciences with the cure of physical disease. Clairvoyants, magnetisers, and mind-readers treated all imaginable ills. When blind folded, they had the power—according to their advertisements—of looking into the bodies of their patients, examining their inmost organs, indicating the affected parts, and prescribing remedies. Hundreds of men, women, and children, whose cases