● ● ● disease is decreed! But did I not before hint of the tendency of science, that forbidden tree? Sir, if despondency is yours from recalling that title, dismiss it. Trust me, nature is health; for health is good, and nature cannot work ill. As little can she work error. Get nature, and you get well.72
To this expression of faith in physical nature, which might be termed the basic fallacy of nineteenth-century American optimism, Mrs. Patterson might have replied with the skeptical Missourian a few chapters later: “Look you, nature! I don’t deny but your clover is sweet, and your dandelions don’t roar; but whose hailstones smashed my windows?”73
Confidence had to reach higher than nature, and for Mrs. Patterson there was only one real place where it could anchor: God. Throughout her life, faith in God had brought healing to her—on one or two occasions physical healing and on many more occasions healing of grief and despair.74 In later years she told of healing the diseased eyes of a baby at this time through prayer alone, through turning with her whole heart to the love of God.75 She also told of making a vow one day that if she herself were healed she would devote the rest of her life to helping other people.76
This was the decade when Florence Nightingale’s work in the Crimean War was winning the admiration of the world, and it may ● ● ●
73 Melville, The Confidence-Man, p. 169. Even Thoreau, when the November mood of his later years chilled his vital forces, could write in his journal:
Is not disease the rule of existence? There is not a lily-pad floating in the river but has been riddled by insects. Almost every tree and shrub has its gall, oftentimes esteemed its chief ornament, and hardly to be distinguished from its fruit. If misery loves company, misery has company enough. Now at midsummer find me a perfect leaf or fruit.
[The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 9, Excursions (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1893), p. 458.]
↑74 For a physical healing see p. 31. Her letters and poems give evidence of the latter kind of healing. Referring to God as “too good to be unkind,” she wrote Martha Rand in 1848: “On Him may you rely, and find a Father and a friend. . . . This is my only consolation, unworthy as I am—and tis the greatest I can recommend to those I love.” Mary Baker Glover to Martha Rand, 20 March 1848, 1919.001.0044, LMC.
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