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Contents
- Abstract
- Mind Cure
- An Historiography of Warren Felt Evans
- The Wounded Healer
- Evans’s Journals, 1850–1865
- Quietism, Metaphysical Idealism, and Swedenborgianism
- Quimby
- Evans Leaves the Methodist Ministry
- The Mature Healer Emerges: Evans Publishes The Mental Cure
- Mind, Body, and the Nerve-Projected Form
- Therapy
- “The Greatest Headlight of Mental Therapeutics”
- Conclusion
Abstract
The Methodist-Episcopalian minister-turned-physician and philosopher of healing Warren Felt Evans (1817–1889) was one of the earliest practitioners of mental healing, also known as “mind cure.” Originating in New England in the second half of the 19th century, mind cure spread through the country in the 1880s. Drawing from Evans’s unpublished journals, I recount his struggles with chronic ill health and his turn to the Quietist mystics and Swedenborg, and then to the mesmerist-turned-mental-healer P. P. Quimby to procure both healing for his ills and philosophical sanctification for his soul. The transformational route Evans traveled reflects the mythico-religious journey of the wounded healer who suffers through a creative illness on the way to becoming a healer himself. The article places Evans and the mind cure movement within late-19th-century Boston’s medical and cultural milieu. Evans’s approach to psychological healing is explored by focusing on his mind-body healing philosophy and mental therapeutics as described in his first 2 mind cure books The Mental Cure (1869) and Mental Medicine (1872).
In 1869, Warren Felt Evans (1817–1889), a former Methodist clergyman, published The Mental Cure in Boston, Massachusetts. His book bore the thought-provoking subtitle, Illustrating the Influence of the Mind on the Body, Both in Health and Disease, and the Psychological Method of Treatment (Evans, 1869). Three years later, Evans followed up with Mental Medicine: A Theoretical and Practical Treatise on Medical Psychology (Evans, 1872). These two books, which went through multiple editions, are widely recognized as the first publications in the American mental healing or mind cure movement (Braden, 1963).
With its promise of improved health and well-being through a metaphysical “mind-over-matter” philosophy, mind cure first found an audience in New England in the 1870s and gained enthusiastic followers throughout the nation and abroad by the 1880s. In the early 20th century, it birthed the even more popular New Thought movement. Historian of medicine Eric Caplan (1998) was one...