Intestinal Ills / Chronic Constipation, Indigestion, Autogenetic Poisons, Diarrhea, Piles, Etc. Also Auto-Infection, Auto-Intoxication, Anemia, Emaciation, Etc. Due to Proctitis and Colitis

by Alcinous B. Jamison

The chronic character of the malady, and the complication of primary with secondary diseases and their symptoms, have thoroughly disconcerted the doctors. Hence the many "causes" assigned for indigestion, constipation, etc., and the many kinds of remedies prescribed with the one sure result, failure; and hence, also, not a few of the self- and drug-intoxicated ones dubbed, or actually developed into, hypochondriacs. Diagnosis wrong, treatment wrong, failure certain, and the foulness of the intestinal canal continued! This is the experience and testimony of the many, many sufferers from the most common malady that afflicts humanity from infancy to old age, and which will continue to afflict the great majority until it is properly understood and treated.

When a sewer of a town is obstructed, the most sensible plan is to begin the investigation at the outlet and then proceed up, section after section, to trace the obstacle that had occasioned the accumulation of debris. When the waste-pipes of a house are clogged, we do not expect the plumber to go to the top of the building and poke substances down the pipe to dislodge the unduly retained material some twenty-five feet or more away. Nor would we believe him if he informed us that the sewer-gas and overflow of waste in the house were the cause of the constipated condition of the drain. But just this is what the doctor declares concerning our sewer; just this is what he does when he doses it with laxatives, cathartics, purgatives. Such is the treatment we receive when we rush to the doctor, or such the treatment we give ourselves. The poor, sensitive, inflamed canal is desecrated on all hands, though part of a house not made with hands—a house that should be a home for the soul of man.

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CHAPTER XVII.

COSTIVENESS.

The words constipation, obstipation and costiveness are often employed as if of exactly similar meaning, but it is well to let each stand for a particular condition. Obstipation implies that the canal of the intestine is stopped up or closed. Constipation carries the idea that the canal is completely filled up with refuse matter. In the normal condition the intestine is divided by transverse bulges or valves or dams into a number of separate segments, the entire arrangement having the effect of preventing too rapid descent of the feces. These folds within the canal may become too much narrowed by disease and thus prevent the movement of the matters inside; this is obstipation. Constipation, stuffing of the gut, may be the result of neglecting the call of nature, and after a time the ability to recognize and answer it is lost; or it may result from inflammation which itself comes from the bad habit mentioned.

The author prefers to use the term costiveness for the general debased condition of the system from auto-intoxication depending upon proctitis and similar conditions of the intestinal tract. And it must be remembered that the same patient may have two or more of these conditions at the same time. Constipation, obstipation and diarrhea may alternate through the progress of the case.

We would expect people suffering from constipation or obstipation to pass as fairly well people for a time, but the same is not true of patients having the other condition, costiveness. As we may speak of the stages of a disease like consumption, so we may speak of these three conditions as different stages of one affliction, the worst being costiveness with its progressive self-poisoning by the products of intestinal decomposition. Early in the case the system may pass these poisons out of the body with comparative ease, by way of the lungs, skin and kidneys. In time the second stage begins to make itself apparent, vitality becomes less and less, calling for a greater variety of medicines to correct the condition, as in the second stage of consumption, and also to arrest the progress of emaciation and anemia or anemic obesity.

The third stage of auto-intoxication is a most unhappy one. The impoverished tissues offer a most favorable soil for the development of diseased conditions. These three stages which are clear to the experienced eye of the physician may to the patient seem to be indistinguishable, the one from the other; and it must not be forgotten that the three conditions do not mean simply that a smaller or larger part of the intestine is clogged by its contents, but that the whole system is involved as well.

It cannot indeed be otherwise with the rapid circulation of the blood, nor need it excite wonder that such patients are thin and debilitated by the deadening of the powers of absorption, assimilation and elimination.