About two or three weeks after Dr. Sims opened his own office he was called to his first patient, “a baby about eighteen months old who had what we would call the summer complaint or chronic diarrhea.” He continues his story, saying, “I examined the child minutely from head to foot. I looked at its gums and, as I always carried a lancet with me and had surgical propensities, as soon as I saw some swelling of the gums I at once took out my lancet and cut the gums down to the teeth ... but when it came to making up a prescription I had no more idea what ailed the child or what to do for it than if I had never studied medicine.” Telling the mother to send to his office for medicine, he continues, “I hurried back to my office and took out one of my seven volumes of Eberle, which comprised my library ... and turned quickly to the subject of Cholera Infantum and read it through, over and over again.... I knew no more what to prescribe for the sick babe than if I had not read it all. But it was my only resource. I had nobody to consult but Eberle.... He had a peculiar way of filling his book with prescriptions, which was a very good thing for a young doctor.... At the beginning of his article of twenty or thirty pages there was a prescription.... So I compounded it as quickly as I knew how and had everything in readiness for the arrival of Jennie.” Speaking of his next visit, he continues: “As the medicine had done no good, it was necessary to change it.” He once more returned to his office and “turned to Eberle again and to a new leaf. I gave the baby a prescription from the next chapter. Suffice it to say that I changed leaves and prescriptions as often as once or twice a day. The baby continued to grow weaker and weaker.” And in a short time it died, although Dr. Sims says, “I never dreamed that it could die!” About two weeks later, he was called to his second patient, another baby which was ailing similarly to the first one. He writes, “I was nonplussed. I had no authority to consult but Eberle; so I took up Eberle again, and this time I read him backward. I thought I would reverse the treatment I had instituted with the Mayer baby. So, instead of beginning at the first of the chapter, I began at the last of the chapter, and turned backward, and turned the leaves the same way, and reversed the prescriptions. The baby got no better from the very first. And soon this baby died.” Dr. Sims was so disheartened, he decided to leave that town, and he did so. But it is just to him to add that he further wrote, “Being obliged to continue in the profession that I had started in, I was determined to make up my deficiency by hard work; and this was not to come from reading books, but from observation and from diligent attention to the sick.”