Thread by @YUKOWAS

For instance, he told a person affected as I had been, only worse, that his lungs looked like a honeycomb, and his liver was covered with ulcers. He then prescribed some simple herb tea, and the patient recovered; and the doctor believed the medicine cured him.

But I believed that the doctor made the disease; and his faith in the boy made a change in the mind, and the cure followed. Instead of gaining confidence in the doctors, I was forced to the conclusion that their sci- ence is false. Man is made up of truth and belief;

and, if he is deceived into a belief that he has, or is liable to have, a disease, the belief is catching, and the effect follows it. I have given the experience of my emancipation from this belief and from confidence in the doctors,

so that it may open the eyes of those who stand where I was. I have risen from this belief; and I return to warn my brethren, lest, when they are disturbed, they shall get into this place of torment prepared by the medical faculty. Having suffered myself,

I cannot take advantage of my fellow-men by introducing a new mode of curing disease and prescribing medicine. My theory exposes the hypocrisy of those who undertake to cure in that way. They make ten diseases to one cure, thus bringing a surplus of misery into the world,

and shutting out a healthy state of society. They have a monopoly, and no theory that lessens disease can compete with them. When I cure, there is one disease the less; but not so when others cure,

for the supply of sickness shows that there is more disease on hand than there ever was. There- fore, the labor for health is slow, and the manufacture of disease is greater. The newspapers teem with advertisements of remedies, showing that the supply of disease increases.

My theory teaches man to manufacture health; and, when people go into this occupation, disease will diminish, and those who furnish disease and death will be few and scarce.”

Phineas Quimby