Preface

Introduction

Chapter I.-Toxemia, the Efficient (First) Cause of All Disease

Chapter II.-Causes of Constipation

Chapter III.-Treatment

Chapter IV.-Constipation as Found in Various Derangements

Chapter V.-A Few Personalities

Appendix


    

    
CONSTIPATION
A New Reading on the Subject

    
INTRODUCTION

    

    AS stated before, constipation is the best known physical derangement to which man is heir, and yet, in spite of its universality and the legions of causes and cures, there is very little known of its true etiology. As proof I refer to text-book etiology and treatment. Perhaps it would be well to mention a truism that should be obvious to all, namely, a treatment based on a correct etiology--cause--must cure. Is the disease ever cured? Its treatment is palliative from the most ancient to the most modern times. It ranges from physics and laxatives, to clysters of high and low degree--from bran-mash, bran bread and cellulose feeding galore, to agar-agar, petroleum and profuse water-drinking; then all sorts of exercises and mechanical vibrations, bimanual manipulations, spinal adjustment, etc., etc. One and all, with nature's ever-willing help, give more or less palliation, but how much any alleged remedy has had to do with curing here and there an isolated case, when a case possibly recovers, must remain an unknown quantity until causation is better understood. So long as cause remains unknown, the treatment of any disease must be haphazard and the benefit, if any, unknown.

    The building of constipation is favored by the customs and habits of modern life, I will not say "modern civilization"--no, not now on the heels of one of the most brutal wars, the type of which makes a Sitting Bull-Custer massacre pall into insignificance. And the end is not yet! No, not so long as commercialism possesses such itching palms.

    Modern life, as it is lived, forces enervation. One of the first symptoms of enervation is constipation.

    
MAN'S FIRST SICKNESS

    Man's first sickness is caused by intoxication, and his taking off in old age is caused by intoxication. Man's first intoxication is from absorption of the toxin of fermentation due to an oversupply of food--overtaxed digestion--and is from the absorption of his own excreta; unless peradventure his mother's milk is made septic from a parturient injury, then he is made toxic from septic infection which will manifest in so-called infantile diseases.

    
INTOXICATION HABIT

    As one kind of intoxication paves the way for another--builds an appetite for another--it is easy and natural for those so poisoned to establish the habit of overeating and smoking, and they take easily to all kinds of narcotics and stimulants, or drugs that deaden sensation--morphine, alcoholics, the coal-tar drugs, tea, coffee and tobacco; sugar, and an excess of starch and meat-eating, must be looked upon as a form of stimulation--intoxication.

    When nerves are daily subjected to stimulation, there is a gradually developing enervation manifested by irritability and excitability; in time there will be so much enervation that the victim is made susceptible to endemic or epidemic influences, and there will be many crises- small diseases: gastritis (catarrh of stomach), constipation, headaches, colds, coughs, sore throats, tired feeling of a morning, etc. Before disease develops there is a subconscious restlessness and longing for thrills or stimulation. Anything that stimulates or thrills the mind or nervous system is eagerly sought out and run after. Babes at the breast, if not left distressingly alone--if handled and exhibited and fed too often--are made restless and nervous, and must be entertained and fed often. Such treatment is in line of overstimulation, and babes become cross, irritable, sleepless and constipated. In boys brought up to overeat, and become intoxicated by retained excreta, the wanderlust develops, and this is accounted for by naturalists as atavism--a reverting to ancient customs--but ancient heredity would not be able to buck through scores of generations without the aid and revivifying influence of the idea of freedom and intoxication. Intoxication deadens the moral nature or not, depending upon the dominating thoughts or type of mind. If the en rapport idea is brutal, it allows the animal nature to preponderate. In war intoxication, the army will be brutal or not, in accordance with the idea or intoxicating thought. The Germans stood for conquest, hence were brutal; the Americans for liberty, hence were humane, if any phase of war can be said to be humane.

    
DRUG HABIT

    The latter half of the nineteenth century built many fortunes out of pills. Pills, squills, and opium built a financial mobility, unequaled even by that of hogs, beer, oil and whiskey. The financial world may be proud of the colossal fortunes which have been built on trafficking in human health and life, the least of which are not vaccines and serums, and certainly estheticism and ethics cannot be proud of the mutilation and wrecked lives which represent the graduates of our sanatoria, hospitals, and "surgical plants."

    
CONSTIPATION IS UNIVERSAL

    As a result of lack of medical wisdom, constipation is universal; and the McLeans and Beachams have taken the lion's share of glory and filthy lucre for their benefactions. But it is the elite of the medical profession who popularize quackery by teaching people mutilation and the drug habit. The better class of doctors have no faith in drugs, yet they prescribe them to those who are ignorant enough to think they must take them. Drugs, except an occasional light saline laxative for palliation, while health is being brought back to the normal, are never required, and if used further enervate and build disease instead of being curative.

    The very young and the old--both ends of life--are frequently afflicted with constipation, and it perhaps is more often the indirect cause of ill health, or sick attacks, than any other one cause.

    
A FEW OF THE COMMON SYMPTOMS OF INTOXICATION

    Autogenerated toxin poisoning, from overfeeding resulting in decomposition and constipation, begins to manifest in children by restlessness, irritability, unruliness, insatiable desire to nurse or eat frequently. In older children the desire to eat is very unmanageable. In many children there is a capricious appetite, and their haphazard eating subjects them to many illnesses--all the diseases said to be peculiar to children--even chorea and epilepsy. Toxemic children are unreasonable and hard to please; when they play they work up easily into a state of frenzied excitement, and when not in this state of excitement they are inclined to be depressed, morose, and to shun company. Many of these children from eight to eighteen are put in institutions as incorrigibles, but if their lives could be ordered, their food-inebriety, constipation and toxin poisoning cured, they would soon become tractable. Children in this class, whose cerebro-spinal systems are delicately poised--nervously constructed--on a hair trigger, so to speak--as hinted above, will be thrown into convulsions. These are the children that get to smoking paper and weed cigarettes before they take to tobacco.

    People look upon the smoking of paper, leaves, weeds, etc., as a childish peccadillo, imitation or play, but there is an ill-defined want that sooner or later will be satisfied by tobacco or other stimulants, or nerve thrills peculiar to self-abuse; or the subconscious longings may find satisfaction in a life of crime which may end in a house of correction.

    Death from acute diseases prevents many unfoldments of a criminal character. Such children are given free rein to eat at the table of unwholesome food mixtures, and between meals, and this breaks down their resistance and prepares them for an early taking off by an endemic or epidemic influence.

    
CONSTIPATION IS MAN'S DISEASE

    Why man of all animals, except perhaps those that are domesticated, should be the only one to suffer from this disease, has a good and sufficient reason, and it is not because "God" did not consult the modern bacteriologist, anatomist, and surgeon, and blundered, as those eminent gentlemen declare, in making the colon too long, but because man's memory is too short; he forgets his duty to self. Neglecting the bowel urge is one habit that builds toleration--constipation.

    Modern anatomists declare the colon to be a useless appendage, a relic of prehistoric times--a curio. How very different were the conclusions to which Cuvier (Ku-vya), the great French naturalist of one hundred years ago, came. It was said of him that he had comparative anatomy so thoroughly worked out that he could build an animal, giving its size and species, if he were given a small bone from any part of the body; and he could describe a fish if given a scale. Surely such unity of construction does not indicate that we are living in a world of haphazard and chance, but, quite the contrary, a world of order and scientific sequence, with philosophical prophecy.

    As surely as the planets are timed in their flight, so surely does order reign in animal and vegetable development.

    The writer has noticed that, in healthy men and women, their anatomical organs have a habit of functioning in an orderly manner and will in spite of their supposed superfluity and lack of organic synthesis; and it is hard to find a diseased human being--a being with organs awry according to modern scientific interpretation--who did not practice a lot of disease-producing habits; and it may be added that this wryness rights itself under reformation of bad habits.

    Does Nature or God make mistakes? Is disease a mistake? Isn't it as orderly as fixed law? If a man brings on heart disease from the use of tobacco, is the heart derangement due to a faulty anatomism? And because of this, should his habit continue and the organ be removed? Certainly this is an extreme suggestion, but I invite any physician to try to prove that this exaggeration is not based on the logic of medicine and surgery as practiced everywhere.

    In windy countries travelers may notice that trees lean in the direction that the wind habitually blows, and if these trees are examined their bark will indicate the directions of the compass. Why should these peculiarities--these defects--not be held as mistakes Of the Great Artificer? Certainly order reigns from the monad to man; from star-dust to the planetary systems. It is unthinkable to have haphazard and order existing together.

    In reasoning out cause and effect, it is necessary to start with a firm mental hold on the one great truth, namely: Absolute Order Reigns. Then to fit man for that Great Truth, man must be honest, not in a commercial or a conventional sense, but in a scientific and mathematical sense; in a sense that corresponds with the mechanics of the spheres. The mind must be attuned to order, then haphazard will not interrupt it in arriving at conclusions--correct reasoning will then be the rule rather than the exception. Man can not play fast and loose with the truth and get anywhere in his reasoning; and I mean by this, man must not distort truth to bolster up his religion, or the religion of the fathers, nor the medical and surgical beliefs of convention. Man must think more of truth than money or personal aggrandizement. Where it is necessary to acknowledge truth and turn down personal advantage, it must be done or man will make shipwreck of ratiocination--his power to reason.

    Why is man uncivilized today? Because he has commercialized his power to reason. He has sold his mental birthright for a mess of pottage. Well may it be charged that the profession builds on a foundation of verity--of fundamental truth--a superstructure of rotten fallacy to fit a commercialism that dominates the world and has caused the late world war, and will continue to evolve wars until mankind is cured of making "my Father's house"--the temple of the mind--"an house of merchandise." "Myself mit Gott" must go out of business. The temple of the mind must be kept free from trafficking, or the world will continue to travel in a circle, with international interests running amuck every little while to prevent the varying interests in national life from kicking up internal war. This is in obedience to the cosmic urge for unison.

    Why all this philosophizing in a small treatise on constipation? Because of the unity of all things, and to show that false reasoning is the cause of man's physical, mental and moral diseases. From the cradle to the grave--from his first intoxicating drink to his final rapport with his God--from his first intoxication from constipation, on through the maze of all fallacious reasoning in works on constipation--the colon and its treatment--ending in vandalizing surgery with a ruined life and premature death--is order and unity; and cause and effect follow each other in as orderly a manner as the day follows the night, to those who have a cultivated discernment.

    Enervation checks elimination; retained excretions are the beginning of toxemic inebriety. Man starts his first drunk at his mother's breast, by too frequent nursing, causing fermentation; continues it with intestinal infection from gluttony; social stimulation, physical and mental; continual overstimulation builds frenzy, ending in social and domestic manias and political revolution; all ending in a holocaust such as the world war.

    Truth practiced by the pregnant mother, and in the care of the babe, in the education and final business life of the child--man or woman--will end the human shipwrecking and will mark the passing of the social reign of the drunk man and drunk woman. I say drunk advisedly--intoxication from wrong eating and wrong thinking. Fallacies require idea-inebriety to keep them intrenched. Truth needs no drunken advocate, it can stand alone.

    Since surgery has developed such a bloodthirst, and medical treatment of disease, based on bacteriology, is such a failure in treating all diseases, especially constipation--colitis and affections incident thereto--our surgeons are attempting to correct the mistakes that the God of Moses made in making man's colon too long, in removing a part, or short-circuiting it, instead; of suspecting that there is something wrong with the theories of modern medicine.

    Is the reason why there are so many mental perverts that some mistake has been made in the original brain pattern?

    Metchnikoff observed that animals with the longest colon had the shortest life, but he did not prove that taking out the colon was followed by a general adaptation of other organs to this change and a lengthening of life to correspond. Neither did he nor Pasteur prove that good health followed the sterilizing of food.

    
FASTING A BACTERICIDE

    The fact that the hibernating bear loses its colon bacilli is not acted upon, and a fast recommended when disease results from overeating, bacterial decomposition and toxin poisoning. An oversupply of food is always the cause of bacterial decomposition and toxin infection, and when continued, catarrhal inflammation, constipation, toxemia, arteritis, endocarditis, and many other crises, called disease, follow. The toxemic are the subjects who die in epidemics, notwithstanding these are the people pointed out by many doctors as perfect types of health. "This epidemic carries off those who are in perfect health," was a remark frequently heard during the 1918 "flu" epidemic. Such a remark is absolutely senseless and worthy of those living in a Fool's Paradise.

    A syllogism based on a bacteriological fundamental must read about as follows: A superabundance of colonic bacteria is a menace to health; a superabundance is caused by overeating, and a normal supply follows moderate eating; and whereas fasting in both cases causes them to disappear, therefore eating within the body's needs does away with the menace. This being true, bacteria become a symptom and in no sense a cause of disease.

    When bacteriologists charge the colon with being an incubating apparatus for hatching germs, they should not forget that the organ must first be abused by habitual overeating to make of it a nuisance, and when it becomes such, then the cause should be removed, not the colon. Surely an incubator will not hatch chickens without eggs--there can be no germination without friendly environments.

    
ORGANIC INTERDEPENDENCE

    There has been an inexcusable tendency for the profession to bring its indictments against organs for any disease developed in them, tacitly, if not otherwise, accusing them of exercising a prerogative they do not have, namely, isonomy--independent action--power to break off or secede from the union of organs. This is not true, for on the maintenance of this union depend the health and life of the organism.

    This idea of the independence of organs--that outside of a few of the leading, such as brain and heart, a part or all of each can be removed with impunity, and even the brain and heart are not spared at times--has caused the reckless slaughter of organs for the past half century, and especially the latter half of that time.

    If it is true that the most insignificant bone in the human body has so definite a shape, size and mutual relation to the other bones of the body, that it can be made the key to the mensuration of the entire skeleton, and that a scale from a fish can be made to tell the unknown size of the animal to which it belonged, is there a mind so illogical as to believe that an organism so organically interdependently constructed can be outraged to the extent that modern surgery outrages it without seriously deranging the efficiency of the entire output, both mental and physical?

    Is there a reasoning power so blunt as to believe that so delicately constructed a mechanism as the human body can be outraged by the introduction into it of all kinds of chemicals and poisons without doing it harm?

    The organs of the body are united into a unit by the circulatory and nervous systems. These organs have an individual work to perform, namely, secretion and excretion, and they do their work well or not, depending upon their power to work--their power to function--and this power is furnished them by the nervous system, whose energy is secured from food of a mental and physical character. Man does not live by bread alone; indeed, thoughts kill or make alive. Both physical and mental foods are indispensable.

    There are volumes dedicated to the colon, and its perverted anatomism, whose authors appear to be as innocent as babes in recognizing the truth that when the anatomism is wrong it is sequential to constipation and may become a complication, but not a primary cause. Virchow, one of the most respected pathologists of the last century, declared that most post-mortems showed evidence of disease of intestines. Indeed, he declared it was almost impossible to find an adult whose intestines did not show adhesions. These findings of the celebrated German pathologist were looked upon as an indictment against the intestines, charging them with delinquency or outlawry; which opinion has led to fallacious treatment, based on the theory that perverted anatomism favors retention of waste and this invites germ invasion--and that bacteria are the cause of intestinal inflammations, ulcerations and adhesions. Indeed, with all the changing theories as to the primary cause of intestinal diseases, the therapeutics rest on the principle that the organ must receive special attention apart from the organism, and the treatment must be directed to the intestine as an independently acting organ. It is insisted that germs cause the fermentation; granted, but why is it that fermentation ceases when the bowels are empty?

    As hinted above, there can be no independent organic action. Organic secretion and excretion, which are strictly functional and confined to individual organs, can not be carried on without the consent of the nervous system. Food can not be digested and conveyed to organs by the circulation of the blood without nerve energy. Food is necessary for the continuance of life--nerve energy--but without nerve energy the food can not be utilized. It is obvious, then, that the most important health consideration from the standpoint of immunization, or restoration after immunity is lost, is conservation and restoration of lost energy.

    It is necessary, then, if nerve energy is of first importance in the upkeep of organic functioning, that the true state of the nervous system, as to its soundness and its ability to administer to organic needs, should be uppermost and always in the physician's mind when advising and prescribing for the sick.

    It is quite generally conceded by all physicians, except perhaps those who are germophobic or neophitic, that no one develops a sickness until he has lost resistance. What resistance? Nerve resistance. Of course, we talk, or twaddle, about white corpuscles (phagocytes), and the condiments (antibodies) that we sprinkle on the bacteria to make them palatable and tempting to the white corpuscles, to induce them to gluttonize on them or eat up the germs so as to keep the germs from eating us; but tacitly we are all united on the one point that disease is caused by lost resistance.

    The bacteriologists have Nero and his show of lions devouring Christians skinned a country block, for they have organized a microscopic circus, menagerie and hippodrome, in which they have the phagocytes (white corpuscles) trained to devour bacteria. When the white corpuscles or phagocytes are not hungry, or the microbes are a bum lot, carrying perhaps a repugnant odor, the ring masters, known as doctors, smear on the rejected bacilli a little opsonin--a condiment. This causes the phagocytes--the lions of the blood--to have a ravenous appetite and they devour the bacilli in large quantities. When the microbes are too shy, or too wary, the masters of the show spread a little tangle-foot, called agglutinin--an anti-body that is found in the serum of the blood of an ex-typhoid fever patient--on the bacilli; this causes them to come together and stick to each other, on the principle that united we stand but divided we fall. When this union is formed and a little lysin is added, the white corpuscles are induced to gluttonize again.

    This savagery entertains the sporting element in the professional men of our time, but there are some drawbacks to a life of sport. One is that all play and enjoyment palls on the players; and another is that the victim in whose blood this show is pulled off cannot stand the wear and tear. It is true the germs are devoured, but the patient dies. Not all, but too large a percentage. In the United States for 1916 the death rate from typhoid fever was 13.3 per cent, against 12 per cent in the Massachusetts General Hospital seventy years ago, before this bacteriological aggregation was dreamed of.

    
WHAT BECOMES OF THE FOOD TAKEN INTO THE BODY?

    Food enters the stomach and bowels, and then it is subjected to the action of solvents preparing it for absorption into the blood; after absorption it is further acted upon by the blood itself, which, in a true sense, is one of the most important digestive organs, for it refines the food elements and prepares them for cell digestion, the very last digestive process completing the metamorphosis of food into living tissue.

    From the beginning to the ending of this process--from the chewing of the food, its solution and absorption into the blood, the transformation that takes place in the blood, as it is carried by the circulation to the lungs where it becomes oxygenated and decarbonized--is a subtle scheme of interorganic exchange of products; the blood being not only a common carrier, but a purifying and refining organ.

    Before going farther, the meaning of decomposition and toxin poisoning should be explained.

    More food is eaten than can be digested properly, or it may be that the combinations are wrong, and instead of physiological, enzymic fermentation--digestion--taking place, pathologic, or bacterial, fermentation takes place. The germs of fermentation--the bacteria or microbes, or organized ferment, that are everywhere--set up fermentation in carbohydrate foods, causing acidity; and decomposition in proteid foods, and putrescence is a product of this fermentation; any and all of which when absorbed, or taken into the blood, causes toxemia. Where there are enough digestive ferments--enzymes--the ever-present germs (bacteria) have no power to act. When man is prostrate with disease--with the evil influence of bacterial fermentation--then he should not eat; for his enzymic power (power to digest) is already overpowered by germs, and to feed under such circumstances is to encourage bacterial fermentation and toxemia. In acute diseases, from a common cold to pneumonia on to typhoid fever, feeding complicates and increases the mortality.

    To recognize germs as man's enemy is a mistake; if, they were enemies they would not quit him when he is prostrate and refusing to take "good nourishing food." When germ action is continued in disease it is when food is forthcoming in quantities that exceed enzymic power. Wounds, ulcers, abscesses, etc., are kept from healing when the food intake is beyond enzymic control.

    As a result of bacterial decomposition, toxin is formed, and when absorbed it poisons the system. Toxins are also taken in from without the body. Any poison generated in the body or out of the body, and taken in, causes toxin poisoning. Any stimulating drugs--namely, opium and its preparations, alcoholics, tobacco, coffee, tea--overeating, overwork, both physical and mental, overworked emotions, etc., all stimulate and intoxicate, which produces enervation, and this leads to toxemia by checking elimination.

    Yes, I believe in germs (ferments, yeasts), and I believe in enzymes (ferment, a digestive yeast built by every organized being). I do not believe that the presence of germs has any more to do with causing disease than the absence of enzymes. Both these ferments are necessary to man's health and well-being. The enervation brought on by toxemia checks secretion and elimination, causes constipation and retention of other organic waste, which, joined with the toxins of fermentation and decomposition, prepares man for the affections or the diseases he develops.

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