injured,
and not the rest of them? they asked. They forgot, or did not know, that
the poison would be more likely to affect one who was weakened in the
abdomen from other causes, than those who were sound; especially when he
took much more of it into his stomach than they did.

In my suspicion about lead poisoning, I had very little sympathy from
those around me. Even the counselling physicians had little confidence
in any such existing cause of disease. They were nearly as ready as
other people to leave the case in the dark, and to say, practically,
"The finger of Providence is here;" or, in other words, It comes of some
cause which God alone knows or _can_ know.

How much of human ignorance--ay, and of human credulity and folly,
too--is clustered round the well-known decision of many a court of
inquest; viz., "Died by the visitation of God!" What do they mean by it?
Do they suppose that since Satan or some other personage whom we call
Death, is guilty of striking us down here and there, those who are not
"struck with death" are struck down by the great Source of light and
life?

The far greater probability is, that they know not what they _do_ mean.
Mankind are not addicted to thinking, especially on subjects of this
sort. It is much easier, or at least much lazier, to refer all our ills
and complaints, as well as their unfavorable terminations, to God or
Satan, friend or foe,--to some agency exterior to themselves,--than to
consider themselves as the probable cause, and proceed to make diligent
search for their own errors.

Thus it was, in a remarkable degree, in the region where it was my lot
to meet and palliate and try to cure diseases. I say, here, _cure_; for
the idea would hardly have found a lodgment, at that early period, in
any human brain which could have been found in that region of rural
simplicity, hardly in my own somewhat more highly enlightened cranium,
that _medical men never cure_; and that when people get well, it is the
result of the operations and efforts of nature, or of nature's God, who
is doing the best thing possible to set matters right.

It was even deemed by many as not only foolish, but almost sacrilegious,
to say much about the causes of disease, and especially about lead. And
then to talk about lead as connected with the use of their favorite red
earthen, which had been in use time immemorial, and which had never, in
all past time, killed anybody, as they supposed, was the dictat