The eleventh objection, and the most ridiculous of all, is that it requires too much time to take the enema twice or thrice daily.
I lose all patience with persons urging this objection. Those that have little or no system with their daily duties seldom have time to do anything of importance. They suffer from “haphazarditis,” a very difficult disease to cure, and they are in many cases hopeless. Usually they are an uncleanly lot of people, full of good intentions, but their intentions, though taken often, seldom operate as an antidote to foulness. Their one sigh the livelong day is: “Oh, could we be like birds that can stool while on the wing or on foot!” This feat of time-saving being hardly possible in the present incarnation and order of society, they content themselves with making a storehouse out of the intestinal canal for an indefinite length of time as they concern themselves with external affairs of work or sport. A sorry lot they are, indeed, when they are laid up for repairs! Many doctors, I am sorry to say, encourage, with a chuckle, this foolish practice. “Any time to stool you can manage to get, so that you stool at least once a day, or once in every two or three days; stool when it is normal for you to do so.” This criminal advice just suits the sleepy, the lazy, or the “awfully busy.”
The American habit of doing things en masse, of handling things in large quantities or in bulk, has something to do with their don’t-care constipated habit. Small evacuations two or three times a day seem too much like small business, which of course is a waste of precious time. Wholesaling, laziness, lack of system, hurry, are the cause of good-for-nothingness of body and mind. It should never be too much trouble to restore the lost impulse for stooling twice or thrice daily.
Is it a small matter to have the main sewer of a city partly or entirely closed, or the main sewer pipe of a dwelling stopped up? Think of the dire results, notwithstanding that the windows and doors remain wide open! The Board of Health would soon deal with the negligent official or landlord. With very few exceptions, “civilized” men, women, and children are negligent and niggardly caretakers of the human dwelling-place—the marvelous body of man. “Lack of time,” “haven’t the time,” or “no time,” is the excuse they give themselves and others.
Notwithstanding the numberless victims around them, none of these negligent and niggardly ones seem to get alarmed until the secondary symptoms—such as indigestion, gout, rheumatism, or disease of some vital organ—are sufficiently annoying to demand attention. But I have full faith in humanity. Man does the best he knows how—as a general rule. But often he doesn’t know how; he needs enlightening.
The hints I have given will, I am confident, be considered and acted upon by all to whose attention they are brought, for, by acting upon them, normal bodies and minds will result, and blessings attained heretofore considered impossible. Normal health depends on right doing and being. Eternal vigilance is the price to be paid for the attainment and maintenance of the goal of normal life and progress. Eliminate all waste material from the body and all shifty vermin from the mind, and the millennium for all things in the universe will soon dawn.
Fig. 24.