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

Foodstuffs are prepared for assimilation in the alimentary laboratory through the process of normal fermentation. Is it not essential, therefore, that the connecting canals and receptacles be cleansed of the fermented debris that may remain unused and unexpelled, before more food be taken by the digestive apparatus? The all-important question is:—How soon and how well have the residuary part of the food (for some part will always be undigested or unassimilated), and the waste resulting from worn-out tissues of the various organs, been eliminated from the system? Wisdom declares that it is not so much what we eat, but what and how well we eliminate, that decides the issues of health and disease. Do the egesta pass out in the form of normal feces? Three times in twenty-four hours foodstuffs are taken, and as many times the bowels should be freed of accumulated excrement and gases. Does Nature have her way, or do neglect and bad habits rule the assimilative and eliminative functions of the bowels?

The habit of storing feces for twenty-four hours ought to concur and keep pace with a habit of eating one meal in the same period. Household and laboratory receptacles in which fermentation has occurred are emptied and cleaned before fresh material is put into them. Is not the same precaution more essential with the receptacles for digestion and egestion? They constitute our chief physiological economy; they are precious household and laboratory utensils; exceedingly precious, as we can purchase no other set when these are worn and wasted beyond repair. What marvelous possessions, and how reckless most of us are with them! Neither love nor money will bring another "body"-house to us when this decays; when poisons or parasites infest it as the result of a pernicious diathesis, of debasing, destructive tendencies; in short, of unmindfulness!

Too often criminal negligence or the lack of proper convenience has brought on the habit of using the intestinal canal as a storehouse for dried feces, and the glands and blood-vessels as reservoirs for the absorbed fluid poisons from the feces that have been stored and thus dried. This baneful habit is general throughout civilized communities. It is this habit that has made the words "constipation," "indigestion," "diarrhea," etc., familiar and household subjects of complaint. Medical writers agree that "constipation" is the most common malady that afflicts mankind; but they are also unanimous in preposterously attributing the cause to the abnormal action of the liver and the secondary symptoms of constipation.

Chronic constipation is the result of proctitis and colitis. Proctitis, the inflammation of the rectal and anal canals, is the most common disease that afflicts the human creature from infancy to old age; and colitis is only the extension of proctitis to the colon.

The scientific diagnosis of constipation predicates proctitis and sometimes colitis. It is declared that constipation is its primary symptom; and that diarrhea is one of its secondary symptoms, resulting from constipation. There is a legion of secondary symptoms of proctitis, all of which medical empiricism considers and denominates causes. As constipation is such an every-day complaint of almost everybody one meets, it will not tax our imagination unduly to conceive how it may be a frequent cause of diarrhea, which is only Nature's effort to get rid of its useless and excessive burden of retained feces and gases. Constipation, semi-constipation, and irregular action of the bowels, excessive fermentation, putrefaction, self-generated or auto-infection, are the factors to be considered. It is to be noted that in many cases diarrhea is simply an increased peristalsis of the bowels, often due to local and diffused irritation and often to inflammation of the mucous membrane (not infrequently with ulceration); all of these may be the outcome of fecal impaction.

To make intelligible the physics of the digestive and egestive processes, we must understand the apparatus. One would naturally think that were the bends or curves of the large intestine undone, it would be found to be a long, straight, smooth canal or bore like a rubber tube. But such is not the case. The outer muscular longitudinal bands are much shorter than the musculo-areolo-mucous tube, an arrangement which brings about a transverse puckering of the gut and mucous membrane, thus forming valves, folds, sacs or pouches at short intervals along the canal. These transverse folds or valves inhibit the too hasty passage of the feces along the bowels by checking and retaining the egested product in the large recesses or pools between the folds; they thus serve as so many dams in the passage of feces toward elimination. This wise provision of Nature to moderate the steady motion of the feces as they proceed toward the sigmoid flexure or receptacle, to wait there till there is a proper stimulus for expulsion, is wofully abused by man. He is quite willing to take foodstuffs three or four times a day, to fill the long row of intestinal pools between the dams with feces and gases in all stages of decomposition, not dreaming of the danger from developing bacteria and their absorption into the system.

Really he is inclined to eat at all times, yet begrudges a few minutes spent in a hurried effort to perform the act of defecation once in twenty-four hours. Some of us even have our minds absorbed in reading while awaiting an "automatic action" of the bowels. What a contrast between the gusto and time spent in taking foodstuffs and the indifference and indolence regarding the action of the bowels, unless indeed severe biliousness or diarrhea reminds us strongly of our sewer of waste products.

An attack of acute or chronic diarrhea is the penalty some pay for long inattention to the demands nature makes for intestinal cleanliness three times in twenty-four hours. Constipated people, semi-constipated people, irregular people and twenty-four-hour people, are not healthy. They are constantly being poisoned by the abnormal products of indigestion and putrefaction resulting from fecal stagnation, which products enter the blood and circulate through every tissue of the body.

All cases of proctitis are more or less accompanied by constipation and diarrhea. In all cases of chronic constipation I have found proctitis, and often colitis, and am forced to believe it is the most common and proximate cause of chronic constipation of the bowels. Constipation being a primary symptom, there must of necessity follow numerous secondary symptoms, of which diarrhea well marks the progress of septic infection. Some of the symptoms of infection are headache, megrim, vertigo, dyspepsia, foul tongue and mouth, back-aches, stiff neck, gnawing pain or numb feeling at the lower end of the spine, biliousness, bad odor from breath and skin, muddy complexion, cold hands and feet, jaundice, neurasthenia, loss of memory, drowsy feeling, pernicious anemia, emaciation, flabby obesity with pallor, capricious appetite, fits of great mental depression, palpitation of the heart, bloating of the stomach and bowels, disturbance of the kidneys, liver, lungs and mucous membrane in general, and especially chronic rhinitis and pharyngitis, which latter are among the first symptoms of imperfect alimentary excretion.

As auto-intoxication (that condition of the system when it is continually poisoned, usually by one's own excretions) gains the mastery of the vital forces at any period of life, the mucous membranes are likely to be first affected by inflammation of catarrhal character; then the serous membranes of the body. Mal-assimilation, mal-nutrition, cell-atrophy, are symptoms of the giving way of the vital energies to the invasion of the filth and bacterial poisons absorbed from the intestinal canal.