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.

My friend's residence, moreover, was in a neighborhood contiguous to
quacks and quackery, in the pretensions to which there were many
believers. These dupes of ignorance and assurance were ever and anon
filling the heads of my "patrons" with their stories of wonderful cures,
in cases almos