Rebecca Beard (1885-1952) was widely known in the 1950/60's as a gifted speaker and teacher in the field of spiritual therapy. Her first book, Everyman's Search, went through many editions because it offered practical suggestions to those seeking a deeper awareness of the power of God in their lives.

Dr. Rebecca Beard practiced medicine for twenty years until she recognized the tremendous influence that thoughts and emotions have upon the physical body. Her medical experience and research led her to the conviction that thoughts and emotions are largely responsible for many illnesses, and that by understanding the thoughts and redirecting the emotions, with the ever present help of prayer, lives can be remoulded and bodies healed.

A long time member of the Society of Friends, Rebecca Beard, along with another successful spiritual healer, Agnes Sanford, worked closely, but by no means exclusively, with Glenn Clark's Camps Farthest Out organization.

How much the two women had been influenced by New Thought is not certain, though Rebecca Beard tells of having attended, in 1945, a conference held in Minneapolis for a group of persons practicing spiritual healing, with the hope that they "might be able to pool their experiences in healing through prayer." (Everyman's Search p.5) This group included several New Thought leaders, representing Religious Science, Divine Science, Unity, and others. But by that time Rebecca Beard had already committed herself to the belief in and practice of spiritual healing.

Long before, she had largely abandoned the use of drugs in her practice in favor of spiritual therapy. She recognized that medicines had their place, but when, she says, we learn that there is only one power behind all the agencies of healing and choose to go directly to that power, we lose our sense of dependence upon them and the need for them. This, though New Thought has no monopoly on it, is thoroughly good New Thought doctrine, and wherever it is taught something of New Thought has entered in, whether consciously recognized or not. The recommended use of prayer and affirmation in her writings, for example, is in good New Thought tradition, and very inline with the teachings of Unity.

Her terminology is much more orthodox Christian than many writers in the New Thought field, however, and as a result her trilogy of books published bewtween 1950-52, Everyman's Search, Everyman's Goal, and Everyman's Mission, were widely read and accepted by many in the mainstream Christian church.

Rebecca Beard's writings were a very important influence to Norman Vincent Peal, author of the multi-million selling book The Power of Positive Thinking also. This is from his Foreword to her second book, Everyman's Goal:

"I gladly testify that Everyman's Goal has done me great good. I am following its outlined teaching, and find that it works. This is one of the most valuable books I have ever read. It is not only a casual "reading book." It is a workable manual of self-realization, self-expansion, self-freeing. Each time you turn to its pages you will see new possibilities in yourself and the world, and you will receive wise guidance for achieving those possibilities."