One day, on examining a pot of pickled cucumbers which had hitherto escaped observation, I found that a part of its glazing had been destroyed by the acid. I no sooner saw this than I was ready to say, _eureka_ (I have found it), and to inform the family and my patient. It appeared that the pickles had been there for some time, and that the boy had eaten of them very freely. The parents and friends, though they had much confidence in the wisdom and skill of their physician, were very slow to believe in the injurious tendency of the pickles. They admitted the danger of such cases generally; but how could the boy be 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.