"I deny disease as a truth," said he, but "admit it as a deception. Disease is an evil that follows taking an opinion for a truth. Every disease is an invention of man, and has no identity in wisdom.... Disease is the misery of our belief, happiness is the health of our wisdom.... False reasoning is sickness and death.... The devil is the error of mankind.... We are made up of truth and error. Disease is an error, or belief; the Truth is the cure." It is necessary to explain, however, that Dr. Quimby found the cause of human misery "not alone in the conscious mind" and the "opinions and beliefs about disease," but in the "mental influences and thoughts by which every person is surrounded," and in the "unconscious or subconscious mind." He declared that he could tell "an idea or cause" of sickness from the sensation produced by it, "just as a person knows an orange by the odor." As he "was able to do this," says Mr. Dresser, "he always told the patient, at the first sitting, what the latter thought was his disease, and never allowed the patient to tell him anything about the case." In a later chapter of our book, the hypothesis that because, in the last analysis "all things are mind," all disease can be cured by mind _while it exists in the body_, will be carefully considered. Meanwhile it must be admitted, without reserve, that under this doctrine, which Dr. Quimby himself believed with all his might, he practised "healing," for many years, with marvelous success. He labored, too, under great difficulties. Fifty years ago, the average inhabitant of New England was not quite so bigoted and superstitious, perhaps, as the Jews in the time of Christ, but quite enough so to suggest a comparison. Dr. Quimby was not orthodox in his theology, and was still less orthodox in medicine. As Mr. Dresser records the situation, "[Those] who were then willing to try a practitioner outside of the medical schools, were persons who had exhausted every means of help within those schools, and, when finally booked for the grave, would send or go to Quimby." In the way of a "grim joke," the Doctor himself said that his patients "would send for him and the undertaker at the same time, and the one who got there first would get the case." And the worst of it all was that his power, when acknowledged, was frequently "imputed to the devil." Still, he had more work than he could do--so much that it wore him completely out, and finally ended his life at the age of sixty-four. In his busiest days, he said: