.

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,