Full Title: The
Mental Cure, Illustrating the Influence of the Mind on the Body,
Both in Health and Disease, and the Psychological Method of Treatment
(1869). While the exact circulation figures for these books is not
known, a ninth edition of The Mental Cure was called for more than sixteen
years after it was first issued; Primative Mind Cure went into at least
five editions, and it is most likely that various editions of his other
books appeared also. One certain fact is that he was the first and indeed
the only figure, aside from Mrs. Eddy, who attempted to work out a
consistent philosophically supported system of what may be called mental
or metaphysical healing, during the first two decades after the death of
P. P. Quimby.
While Phineas P. Quimby may without doubt be regarded as the founder not
only of the New Thought Movement but of the so-called Metaphysical
Movement in America, credit for the spread of his ideas and methods, as
well as for the organization of movements that have made these a force in
American life, go to four others. These were four sick people who sought
healing at his hands within a period of less than two years, in 1862-63:
Annetta G. Seabury, Julius A. Dresser, Mary Baker Glover Patterson (later
Mary Baker Eddy), and Warren Felt Evans.
Julius A. Dresser and Annetta Seabury, who were husband and wife, were the
first effectively to organize what has since been called New Thought; Mary
Baker Eddy became the founder of Christian Science; and Warren Felt
Evans became the first to give literary form to the new ideas and
methods of cure, though he never seems to have concerned himself with any
institutional expression of either -- save that he established a kind of
mind-cure sanitarium at Salisbury, Massachusetts, to which people came for
rest and healing.
In 1867 he opened an office in Boston and for more than twenty years, with
his wife, practiced and taught informally the principles of mental
healing. Evans not only
healed but he wrote a great deal. His great distinction lies in the fact
that he was the first to write of the new healing and its basis as taught
and practiced by Quimby. His first book, The
Mental Cure, (Illustrating the Influence of the Mind on the Body, Both in
Health and Disease, and the Psychological Method of Treatment,)
was published in 1869, only three years after Quimby's death and six years
before the appearance of Science
& Health
by Mrs. Eddy. Thus Evans became the first in a long line of exponents of
the basis of New Thought ideas and methods to set them forth in published
book form.
Evans continued to write during his whole active career.
Mental
Medicine
was published in 1872; Soul
and body,
Evans' third book, saw the light the same year as Mrs. Eddy's Science
and Health
did, in 1875. His most widely read book, The
Divine Law of Cure, appeared in 1881 and went through many editions. The
Primitive Mind Cure
was
issued in 1885, and a year later, in 1886, Evans' last book, Esoteric
Christianity and Mental Therapeutics, was given to the public. This too had a wide sale.
Whilst the exact circulation figures for these books is not known, a ninth
edition of The
Mental Cure
was called for more than sixteen years after it was first issued; Primative
Mind Cure
went into at least five editions, and it is most likely that various
editions of his other books appeared also.
The New Thought periodicals which began to appear in the late 1880's
continued to carry advertisements for his books at least to the end of the
century, and copies of the books were to be found in the major public
libraries and the libraries of most New Thought leaders and centers.