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Introduction : The Secret Lives of Battered Children Child abuse is the greatest secret of all. It is a secret to family members who don’t see it, to professionals who don’t understand it, to politicians who neither see nor understand it. But child abuse is not a secret to every- one. What Happened in the Woodshed is a detective story of how well- trained and experienced child abuse pediatricians can deduce, much like Sherlock Holmes, how an injury was infl icted from the injury itself. The crime scene of a child’s abused and neglected body can, through careful medical analysis, lead us inexorably back to what happened, sometimes to who did it, and most revealingly to why it happened. Told through the eyes of child abuse pediatricians, What Happened in the Woodshed is a book about some of the abused and neglected children I and my colleagues have seen, not all of them of course, but the most compelling of so many compelling cases. Some cases will always feel fresh in our minds even after many years, not only because of their sever- ity but because of their lasting impact on us personally and professionally. Perhaps disproportionately, we talk about dead babies, battered babies, starved and neglected babies. This is not intended to shock, though shocking these cases may be, nor is it intended to ignore the many chil- dren who are abused in other ways. But, rather our intent is to describe our own most compelling experiences. Among my own cases, there is the 14-year-old boy lying on his death bed. His mother buys a cemetery plot, family gathers around, but some- thing isn’t quite right. How was it that his sibling had died years earlier from a similar mysterious illness, one that even then raised questions about intentional poisoning?