One practical but general error deserves to be noticed, for want of a better place, in this very connection. Notwithstanding the great difficulty of convincing a person who habitually uses extra stimulants, narcotics, or any medicinal agents, all the way from rum, opium, and tobacco, down to tea, coffee, and saleratus, that they are injuring him at all, as long as he does not feel very ill, yet it ought to be clearly and fully known that every one who is thus addicted to unnatural habits, and being thus addicted is seized with disease of any kind and from any cause whatever, is certain to have that disease with greater severity than if his habits had been, from the first, perfectly correct or normal. Nor is this all. Medical aid, whenever invoked under these circumstances, is more questionable as to its good tendencies. No medical man of any skill or observation but must feel, in such a case, most painfully, the terrible uncertainty of that treatment of the living machine which is quite enough so when the habits have been most favorable, by being most correct.
One caution of quite another kind may be interposed here. My patient above had neglected to call on me for several days in the beginning of his disease, under the very general impression of ignorant people, that if he called a physician he should certainly be severely sick; for if he was not already very sick, any efforts to prevent disease would only serve to make him so.
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.