e of
almost any thing else rather than of good, sound, sober, common sense.

You can hardly imagine, at this day, in the year 1859, what an air of
incredulity the gaping countenances of the family and neighbors of my
young friend and patient presented, when I told them stories of lead
disease in different parts of the country, especially of such cases as
were then recent and fresh in my memory. One of these stories may not be
out of place in the present connection.

About the year 1812, the people of Elizabethtown, Penn., put up what
they called their apple butter in these same red earthen vessels,
glazed, as almost everybody now knows, with an oxyde of lead. There had
been a pottery established near the village that very year, and it was
thought not a little patriotic to purchase and use its products, thus
favoring the cause of home manufacture. Nearly every family, as it
appeared in the sequel, had bought and used more or fewer of these
vessels.

This was, of course, some time in the autumn. In the progress of a few
months a dreadful disease broke out in the village, which baffled the
skill of the best physicians, and consigned some forty or fifty of the
inhabitants to the grave. The cause, at first, was not at all suspected.
At length, however, from a careful examination of facts, it was
ascertained that the disease which had proved so fatal must have had its
origin in the glazing of these vessels. The sickness abated only when it
had attacked all whose bowels--already weakened by some other cause or
causes--were duly prepared for the poisonous operation of the lead. It
is indeed true that the physicians supposed the disease came to a stand
on account of the overwhelming tendency of huge doses of calomel, which
they gave to almost everybody who had used the apple butter; but of this
there was no satisfactory evidence. It ceased, as I believe, and as I
have already intimated, because--except in the case of those who were
enfeebled by other causes, nature was too strong for it, or her
recuperative powers too energetic.

Now this story illustrates a case which, in magnitude or in miniature,
is in our country of almost every-day occurrence; and the only reason
why the results everywhere else are not like those at Elizabethtown, is
simply this: that there is not so much of the poison used in any one
village, at the same time, as there was at that place in the
circumstances which have been mentioned. One is sick here,