On the road, I observed that an eruption of a peculiar kind had appeared, particularly about the forehead, accompanied with small blisters. It was not here that I had applied the solution, but on the arms, chest, and lower limbs. Of course the corrosive sublimate, if at all operative, had affected me through the medium of the circulation and not by direct contact.

Our physician came, pronounced the disease erysipelas, and without saying a word about the cause, prescribed; and I followed out carefully his prescription. But the disease had its course in spite of us both, and was very severe. It took away my sleep entirely for a day or two. It proved a means of removing the hair from one side of my head, and of so injuring the skin that it never grew again. Indeed, gangrene or mortification had actually commenced at several points. Suddenly, however, the pain and inflammation subsided, and I recovered.

Now my physician never said that I was poisoned by the corrosive sublimate, probably for the two following reasons: 1, I never made the inquiry. 2, He would probably have ascribed the disease to taking cold rather than to the mercury, had I inquired. I do not believe I took cold, however. How it came to affect me so unfavorably I never knew with certainty; but that it was the medicine that did the mischief I never for one moment doubted. I suppose it was absorbed; but of the manner of its introduction to the system I am less certain than of the fact itself.

But besides the absorption of the corrosive sublimate into the system, and its consequences—a terrible caution to those who are wont to apply salves, ointments, washes, etc., to the surface of the body unauthorized—I learned another highly important lesson from this circumstance. Active medicines, as I saw more plainly than ever before, are as a sword with two edges. If they do not cut in the right direction, they are almost sure to cut in the wrong.

I must not close, however, without telling you a little more about the treatment of my disease. After I had left my school and had arrived at home, a solution of sugar of lead was ordered in the very coldest water. With this, through the intervention of layers of linen cloth, I was directed to keep my head constantly moistened. Its object, doubtless, was to check the inflammation, which had become exceedingly violent. Why the sugar of lead itself was not absorbed, thus adding poison to poison, is to me inconceivable. Perhaps it was so; and yet, such was the force of my constitution, feeble though it was, that I recovered in spite of both poisons. Or, what is more probable, perhaps the lead, if absorbed at all, did not produce its effects till the effects of the corrosive sublimate were on the wane; so that the living system was only necessitated to war with one poison at a time. Mankind are made to live, at least till they are worn out; and it is not always easy to poison a person to death, if we would. In other words, human nature is tough.

Now I do not know, by the way, that any one but myself ever suspected, even for one moment, that this attack of erysipelas was caused by the corrosive sublimate. But could I avoid such a conclusion? Was it a hasty or forced one? Judge, then, whether it was not perfectly natural that I should be led by such an unfortunate adventure to turn my attention more than ever to the subject of preserving and promoting health.

For if our family physician—cautious and judicious as in general he was—had been the unintentional cause of a severe attack from a violent and dangerous disease, which had come very near destroying my life, what blunders might not be expected from the less careful and cautious man, especially the beginner in medicine? And if medical men, old and young, scientific as well as unscientific, make occasional blunders, how much more frequently the mass of mankind, who, in their supposed knowledge of their own constitutions and those of their families, are frequently found dosing and drugging themselves and others?

I do not mean to say that in the incipiency of my observations and inquiries my mind was mature enough—well educated enough, I mean—to pursue exactly the foregoing train of thought; but there was certainly a tendency that way, as will be seen more fully in the next chapter. The spell at least was broken, and I saw plainly that if "died by the visitation of God" never means any thing, it generally does not. And as it turned out that the further I pushed my inquiries the more I found that diseases were caused by transgression of physical and moral law, and hence not uncontrollable, why should it not be so, still farther on, in the great world of facts which I had not yet penetrated?