One Simple Idea Read Online Free

experimentation that the positive-thinking ideal actually began to take shape—and in settings far removed from universities, seminaries, or philosophical societies.
    In the 1830s, a handful of New Englanders, some raised in America and others transplanted from England and France, started to probe the inner workings of the mind. The New England experimenters, in a period before modern psychological language, gave birth to a set of hypotheses about the effects of thoughts and emotions on health, and about the power of a deeply held idea to alter behavior or outer events.
“I Gave Up to Die”
    A dramatic turn in how the Western world came to view the mind played out in Maine in 1833. This development hinged upon the experience of a simple and extremely influential man: a New England clockmaker named Phineas P. Quimby. That year, quietly and with little forethought, Quimby embarked on a psychological experiment that formed the germination of the positive-thinking outlook.
    A man in his early thirties, Quimby was suffering from tuberculosis. Under doctor’s orders he had been ingesting calomel, a popular though disastrous therapy in the first half of the nineteenth century. It was a mercury-based toxin that induced massive salivating and foaming of the mouth. Calomel was a common treatment among physicians who practiced “heroic medicine.” The theoretical framework behind heroic medicine was that the draining of bodily fluids could rid a patient of disease and serve as an overall tonic to health. The champion of this approach was physician Benjamin Rush, a friend of Thomas Jefferson’s and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Rush was broadminded in matters of religion. He was among the few friends in whom Jefferson confided his own heterodox religious views, including his disbelief in Biblical miracles. But Rush’s medical ideas, which dominated the American scene for generations, were medieval.
    Along with calomel ingestion, Rush prescribed bleeding or bloodletting, a protocol embraced by other American doctors, who added a variety of measures to drain bodily fluids, such as open or “weeping”wounds, the ingestion of toxins and narcotics to produce profuse sweating, and—almost unbelievable in the modern era—the application of bloodsucking leeches. Rush viewed illness not as something to be healed but to be combated. “Always treat nature in a sick room as you would a noisy dog or cat,” he told students, “drive her out at the door and lock it upon her.” This was the reality facing Quimby and most American patients in the first half of the nineteenth century.
    By the early 1830s, the ingestion of calomel was causing Quimby to suffer from mercury poisoning. The side effects were disfiguring. “I had taken so much calomel,” he later wrote in his journals, “that my system was said to be poisoned with it; I lost many of my teeth from that effect.” He continued, “In this state I was compelled to abandon my business and, losing all hope, I gave up to die.” At this time Quimby and his wife, Susannah, had two sons and an infant daughter. How they managed to support a family during Quimby’s illness is a trial of which he makes no mention.
    With little left to lose, Quimby turned to a therapeutic procedure recommended by a friend: horseback riding. “Having an acquaintance who cured himself by riding horseback,” he recalled, “I thought I would try riding in a carriage as I was too weak to ride horseback.” In actuality, Quimby was reprising a treatment known to the ancient Greeks, who used vigorous horseback riding as a tonic. One day Quimby set off in his carriage in the countryside outside Belfast, Maine. He had a “contrary” horse, which kept stopping and finally would not budge unless the clockmaker ran beside him. Exhausted from running the horse up a hill, Quimby collapsed into the carriage and sat stranded two miles from home. He managed to call to a man plowing a nearby field and