Now this is, as a general rule, a very great mistake. It would be much more safe to call a physician very early, than to wait till Nature is so much embarrassed and even crippled that we can place very little reliance on her efforts. Worse still is it for the physician, when called late, to load down the enfeebled system with medicine by way of atoning for past neglects. Thousands have made the mistake here alluded to, and have thus been a means of hastening on a fatal termination of the disease. It is not by any means improbable that such was the result in the foregoing instance. CHAPTER XLV. THE INDIAN DOCTOR. A little child about two years of age, severely afflicted with bowel complaint, came under my care during the first year of my medical practice, and proved the source of much difficulty. She was the child of a mother who had been trained to delicacies, in the usual fashionable way, and who had begun to carry out the same wretched course of education in her own family. In addition to a generally wrong treatment, the child had been indulged, for many weeks before I was called, with a large amount of green, or at least very unripe, fruit. It was at a season of the year when both children and adults were suffering from bowel complaints much more than at any other; but as the hot days and nights were expected soon to give way to the cooler and longer nights of October, I fastened my hopes of the child's final recovery, very largely, on the natural recuperative effects of the autumnal season. I did not attempt to give much medicine. My reliance was almost wholly on keeping up what I was wont to call a good centrifugal force, or in keeping the skin--the great safety valve of the system--in proper and healthful activity. Much that I ordered was in the way of bathing, local and general, especially warm bathing. The parents of the child were among my most confidential, not to say influential, friends. If there was a family within the whole of my medical circuit with whom my word was law, it was this. Yet after all they were ignorant, especially of themselves; and such people always were and always will be credulous. They would open their ears, not only to the thousand and one insinuations of malice and envy, which at times are ventured against a young physician,--especially if he is going ahead, and as they say "getting rich" too fast, and thus securing more than they believe to be his share of public popularity;--but to the still larger number, if possible, of weak criticisers in his practice.