sufferers we have good news; and for
the class that have suffered five or ten years we have better news; and
for the class of infants and children that have started on the road of
ill-health we have real glad tidings. To know that there is only one
chief cause for chronic constipation and its train of disorders, and
that that cause overshadows all other causes combined, and is easily
diagnosed and treated, is news long hoped and prayed for by a multitude
of sufferers the world over.

Twenty years as a specialist in diseases of the lower bowels have
demonstrated to the writer that chronic inflammation, and often
ulceration, of the rectum and sigmoid flexure, in ninety-nine cases out
of a hundred, is the cause of chronic constipation and the long army of
ills resulting from it. And yet, as the reader is well aware,
constipation has had many "causes," since the days of Hippocrates,
especially the abnormal condition of the liver.

The etiology, that is, the exciting cause, of the inflammation of the
anus, rectum, colon, etc., may date from the time a diaper was placed
on the new-born infant. Excoriations of the integument about the anus
by the excretions of bowels and bladder indicate that the mucous
membrane of anus and rectum demands local remedies, as well as the
integument of the buttocks, and that it is not the liver which is at
fault. The many applications of the diaper during the period of its
use, and the frequently delayed removal at night or during long rides
in baby wagons, railway trains or carriages, and during long social
visits of the nurse; constipating foods, lack of drinking water,
constipating medicines, followed by all sorts of purgatives, etc., are
among a few of the direct causes of diseases of the rectum. A child at
the age of eighteen months with a healthy rectum is most rare.

The ten thousand and one chances for contracting disease of the anus
and rectum do not cease with the period of infancy. The child is left
pretty much to shift for itself as to regularity of eating and the
evacuation of the contents of its bowels, wherein disease has already
obtained a foothold. All kinds of foodstuffs, at all hours, with seeds,
stones, etc., are poked into its stomach, followed by constipating
remedies to quiet inevitable troubles, or brisk purgatives given with
the hope of expelling the arrested contents of the bowels. Is it any
wonder that ninety-eight persons of adult age out of every hundred
suffer mor