About the Author

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby was born on February 16, 1802, in Lebanon, New Hampshire and died on January 16, 1866, in Belfast, Maine where he lived most of his life. Quimby was an accomplished clockmaker, inventor and Daguerreotypist. In the late 1830s, he learned of mesmerism and became an expert mesmerist. Quimby came to question accepted theories of what was happening in mesmerism and eventually developed his own system of spiritual healing, in which the emphasis was on the action of God, rather than merely the influence of one human mind on another. Quimby was so busy practising healing, mostly in Portland, Maine, that he failed to publish his writings. Excerpts from these were published over the years, but it was not until 1988 that there was published Phineas Parkhurst Quimby: The Complete Writings, edited primarily by Ervin Seale.