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

    In selecting as the subject of my address on this occasion the urgency of research in a line along which little progress has been made, I am led to do so by considerations which I think will appeal to many of my hearers. It is, first of all, one which is of transcendent importance as an antecedent to any great advance in scientific medicine in the near future. On looking over the road on which so much progress has been made in the last forty years, one cannot but be impressed with the idea that all the old lines of research have been developed as far as they are capable of yielding results commensurate with the expenditure of time and energy given to them and that we are now in the stage of diminishing returns. The record since 1880 is crowded with discoveries in scientific medicine which will preserve from oblivion those who have made them, but unless some new lines of attack on great problems are to be thrown open the record for the next thirty or forty years will not have to its credit similar achievements. A recognition that our present methods of research in scientific medicine are not to give solutions of some of the great problems in disease which still confront us is already beginning to prevail. The distinguished clinician, Sir James MacKenzie, who has been during the last thirty years one of the keenest students, on the scientific side, of clinical medicine, is so convinced that scientific medicine as now developed is not going to yield any further conquests of importance that he has been compelled to seek a new line of research which may give results which will initiate a new and great advance in medical science. The new line which he has taken is the study of the beginnings of disease in the individual, that is, a close and very careful observation of the changes in the normal condition long before the individual is impelled to consult his physician or is aware that anything is wrong with him. Sir James hopes that in this way a great amount of knowledge may be accumulated which will throw a flood of light on the origin of many of the diseases and thus inaugurate what may be justly called a great advance in medicine, comparable with any great advance made in the past.

    It is hardly possible to doubt that a careful study of the organs of the body, as they function in the supposedly normal individual, will, if systematically pursued, ultimately give a lore that will be of inestimable value in determining a fundamentally rational treatment of disease. The application of our present clinical methods is confined almost wholly to the manifestations of disease in its more or less pronounced stages, and the features of the initial stages attract the attention of only a very few clinicians. Here, therefore, is an almost fallow field, where anyone who enters to work steadily and systematically may reap a worthy reward for the toil of all his years. This, combined with a closer, a more thoroughly scrutinizing study of the manifestations of disease in its later stages of development, would result in a very great addition to our lore of medicine, and bring us back to the ancient Hippocratic role of closely observing and recording which, pursued for periods during the last twenty-four centuries, has made the Art of Medicine of the Western World an ornament of our civilization.

    It is, however, doubtful if there is in our generation enough of those of the class of which Sir James MacKenzie is representative to make such an immediate advance in medicine as he believes possible. Progress is due to the activities of the almost inconceivably few. All the ideas, all the knowledge which determines our outlook on the physical world and the world of life of today are based on the results of the discoveries and inventions of less than one ten-thousandth of one per cent of the population of the Western World during the last three thousand years. Even in the medical profession it is the inconceivably few to whom all progress in the past has been due. The rest have accepted and applied the results of the great discoveries of the few. Of the 400,000, more or less, who in Europe and America during the last century and a half have been members of the medical profession, how many have made, as a result of their researches and observations, great additions to our knowledge of the causation and treatment of disease? I would venture to estimate not more than thirty, that is, one out of every 13,000 in the ranks. These were the pioneers in the regions of the unknown to whom we owe the great generalizations which constitute the foundations of what we call medical science. Without their achievements there would have been no advance in it during the last three centuries, and medicine would still be but a lore of impossible hypotheses and theories like that which darkened understanding amongst the physicians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There were indeed others who by their observations in their own limited field of activity added fact upon fact in verification of the great generalization and who by their support of these made their general acceptance possible, but they would not have been of service in any other way to medical science had it not been for the great discoveries of the pioneers.

    To extend this science today, to make here and there great additions to it, pioneers of the same type are still required. Are such now in training, or beginning their career, or ready to launch some new line of extension?

    Sir James MacKenzie does not apparently think there are or will be such, for his Newer Medicine is to owe its achievements to organizations the members of which will devote themselves to the observation and correlation of the facts which may be gained from a continuous, systematic study of the very earliest manifestations of alteration of function which mark the commencement of disease in the supposedly healthy individual. He is apparently extremely skeptical of the value of the laboratory by itself as a factor henceforth in the advancement of our knowledge on the treatment of disease. Research on the laboratory side is carried on by workers who, he holds, are out of touch with the problems in medicine, and in consequence their contributions offer little in the way of a solution of these, which must be undertaken by the physicians themselves who are in immediate contact with the problems on the purely clinical side.

    It must, I think, be admitted by all who are in touch with the present laboratory methods associated with the diagnosis and treatment of disease that the effort spent in the development of them by a multitude of workers in laboratories and the narrow range of the results obtained make it appear as if the vast majority of investigators concerned believe the great problems that can be attacked successfully are all solved, and that there remains only to be developed an ever more and more refined technique, which will be concerned only with circumscribed problems, such as the hydrogen ion concentration, basic metabolism, new reactions of the class of Widal, Schick and Wassermann, more exact methods for the determination of sugar, urea, uric acid, ammonia and other constituents of and metabolic products in the blood, and so on. These and like matters of limited interest and range of application constitute the vast majority of the problems which are now being investigated, if the contents of the original papers published in the journals devoted to physiology, biochemistry and pathology give a trustworthy indication of the character of the research that is being carried on in these sciences today.

    Behind all these problems there are at least several which concern the causation of a considerable number of pathological changes and alterations in function in the organs of the body. These problems are all related to the functions of the intestinal mucosa. Such functions are only very imperfectly known. One involves the absorption of the products of the digestion of the foodstuffs. In this absorption the mucosa has been, and is still too often, regarded as if it were only a physical membrane separating the blood from the intestinal contents, through which the peptones, amino-acids, glycerine and sugars diffuse to reach the vascular channels. What we have to set over against this physical concept are a few facts the significance, however, of which is not clear. Soaps and fats which are colloids enter and go through the epithelial cells of the mucosa, and a number of proteins, those of egg yolk particularly, pass unchanged readily into them, but how the former and the latter are so taken up is still unknown or only dimly comprehended. The salts of iron and potash can be traced microchemically in their passage through the epithelium, and the phenomena involved appear at first view to be caused by the simple forces of diffusion, but on further consideration one must postulate that other and more important factors are concerned. We know, further, that the mucosa, especially of the upper half of the small intestine, secretes a number of ferments, such as erepsin, invertase, maltase, lactase, and the activator of trypsinogen, enterokinase, and that secretin, the hormone of the pancreas, is a product of the duodenal mucosa, but, except in the case of secretin, we do not know definitely what elements of the mucosa form them.

    This, in brief, comprehends our knowledge of the activities of the intestinal mucosa, and yet how exiguous it is in comparison with what may yet be obtained through careful and well-directed research. The mucosa is, in its properties and functions, something very much more than a physical membrane. Because its superficial layer is composed of living cells, it is not, it cannot be, a passive element, for the cells have, as living units always have, the capacity to accept or reject whatever constituents of the chyle there may be, and this capacity is exercised by them through the long life of the individual. They even maintain themselves against the invasion of bacteria of the ordinary type.

    The intestinal mucosa must then be regarded as the great portal to disease of the body. This portal may be completely closed, as it is in the normal healthy condition of the mucosa, or it may be gradually or suddenly pushed open and disease, chronic or acute, may result. If this portal could be kept closed always, old age might be indefinitely postponed and bodily vigor maintained for a much longer period than it is now. There is no reason to suppose that the heart, the skeletal muscles, the liver, the kidneys, the nervous system and the endocrinous organs cannot function indefinitely if they are not subject to toxic action, and in their normal condition they must be much less subject, through any other portal, to bacterial infections than they are when their condition is altered by the access of toxic material absorbed from the intestinal cavity. The complete closure of the great portal permanently maintained would greatly lessen the incidence of disease and increase the average length of life."

THE GARDEN OF EDEN LEGEND IN THE LIGHT OF TOXEMIA

    It should be remembered that man is normally all the time toxemic; but up to a certain stage it is normally stimulating; the same is true of food, pleasure of all kinds, and exercise or work. Of all the fruits in the garden of life it is man's pleasure to eat, except of the fruit of knowledge; which means that when man surfeits he has eaten of the fruit of knowledge, and unless he profits by that knowledge he will surely die. When he will not be guided by the knowledge of good and evil he is expelled from Eden, the paradise of health in which he was born, and from that day he will eat his bread--enjoy his pleasures--in pain. "In sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life."

    After toxemia has been increased by overindulged pleasures to the saturation point, man becomes acquainted with discomfort, and unless the knowledge of the cause of that discomfort is acted upon, he will pay. for his overindulgence in sickness, pain, and early death. The laws of health are inexorable; we see people going down and out in the prime of life simply because no attention is paid to them. The health teaching up to date is largely a system of camouflaging the ignorant and credulous.

     The idea of cure is a dangerous fallacy, and a world of disease and premature death is what mankind is paying for it. The legendmakers of the Bible offered no hope to those who ate of the tree of knowledge--who surfeited to the point of toxemic saturation; their sentence was death or banishment of all pleasure. But man can come back if he will develop a permanent self-control and live a life of moderation.

    Toxemia is a worked-out hypothesis based on the fundamental laws of nature, and it is the only truth concerning the cause and cure of disease, and certainly offers the only rational method of disease prevention and is so simple that it can be taught to a child.

    The Edenic fatalism was based on no more benightedness than present-day know-nothingism concerning man's helplessness with regard to disease, its cause and cure.

    A fact not known to medical science, and one giving irrefutable proof of the truth of the Toxemic Hypothesis, is that few people could be taken off the street, or out of business or the trades, and put to bed and on a fast who would not be made very sick within a week, overwhelmed by the poison of their own elimination. It is this throwing off of toxin after a prostration from any so-called disease that gave rise to the well-known saying that all sick people must be worse before they are better, even when under the most skilful treatment. This is nature's cure, and in pronounced toxemia nature's cure is certainly heroic. The distressing symptoms caused by rapid elimination cause doctors to don the war paint of their profession and go after the pronounced symptom in a heroic manner. Coughs are suppressed, pain subdued, fever extinguished, weakness nourished, faintness stimulated, diarrhea checked, constipation physicked, perspiration dried, wakefulness lulled and every discomfort palliated. What really takes place in a good red-hot battle against disease? Suppression. Nature often finds herself bucked and gagged--hog-tied to a fare-you-well, with the nervous system paralyzed from pent-up toxins. The pneumonia patient dies smothered to death by suppressed secretion, the digestive tract overwhelmed by decomposing food. The physic may irritate so greatly that a movement may be secured, but certainly any tendency for elimination is most effectively checked.

    Since serum treatment has become the vogue more patients recover because the treatment is not so belligerent and nature is not so greatly opposed.

    If the people are ever enlightened on the subject, and come into the truth that few possess a reasonable amount of health, and the majority are perambulating cesspools, as vulnerable as a powder magazine, they may decide to make an effort to get well before a collapse comes.

    A most excellent knowledge for the people would be to know that when sickness comes the proper treatment is to go to bed, poise mind and body, and know they are in the hands of the best doctor--nature--and that they will get well in the shortest possible time if they do nothing.

    All people are toxemic; but all people are not sick who are toxemic, for there must be sufficient accumulation to overcome resistance. All people differ in resisting power. Those who possess one hundred per cent natural power, everything equal, should have twice the resistance of the one who is born with fifty per cent natural power. If, however, the fifty per cent man is conservative and strictly controls every nerve leak, it does not require a Newtonic calculating ability to tell that these men are approaching a single standard of resistance. If the hundred per cent man is living in a manner to cause a diminishing return--that is, if his excesses are reducing his powers of reconstruction and he is retrograding--he is using up more nerve energy than he is building, and what he has is being taken from him; while the fifty per cent man is adding to his power according to the law of increase: "To him who hath shall be given" (Matthew XII, 12); hence they are approaching a common ground.

    The continual (often repeated) influences which use up nerve energy, are met by a continuous (without pause) renewal of nerve energy, and this is why man continues to live and have health; but when there are enough stimulating influences to cause a continuous nerve expenditure, then no break or pause for rest or recuperation is experienced, and man is then on the toboggan that I am pleased to name profound enervation, which will quickly carry him down and out.

    The heart illustrates this point well: When the body is normal and the blood is chemically correct, the heart rests enough between beats for tissue renewal--self-reparation; but when enervation checks elimination and waste products are retained, then there is created a pathologic toxemia and the heart is overworked; being overstimulated, it fails to renew itself; this is called functional disease, which in time, if not corrected, ends in organic disease.

    When the body is stimulated continuously--when physical and mental stimulation is experienced continuously, instead of continually--enervation follows. For example, when business or work is accompanied by worry, and the worry fills the resting spaces, instead of the work being continual it becomes continuous, because the spaces or recesses for rest are filled with worry or some other overworked emotion, or physical stimulants such as tobacco, alcohol, or other stimulants and gluttony, until power to sleep is lost; then there is no chance for renewal. It is then that continuous stimulation is experienced and disease follows. The banker or other business man who works six hours or more a day may tax his body every minute when not at work by worry and sensual indulgences, and because of no rest he breaks down in middle life. It is not to be forgotten that toxin from checked elimination and toxin from bacterial fermentation in the stomach and bowels during this man's decline evolve such a state of Toxemia that crises are showing up continually: headaches, tired feeling of mornings, constipation; occasionally there may be bilious spells, diarrhea once or twice a year, a taste in mouth of a morning, coated tongue, dizziness, catarrh, sore throat, closing of nose, tonsilitis, cough, asthma, rheumatism, lumbago, sweating feet, flagging memory, attacks of "flu," la grippe, or about every epidemic, and a gradually growing pessimism showing in irritability, grouchiness and fault-finding with those about him. His taking off may be by pneumonia, kidney disease, paralysis or apoplexy. All these symptoms belong to Toxemia in a gouty subject weighing from twenty to one hundred pounds too much.

    Worry, work, and eating beyond digestive capacity, followed by fermentation, and the stimulation from the toxin of fermentation, food and its digestion, amount to continuous stimulation, giving no interval for rest and recuperation, and as a result bodily functioning is diminished--secretion and excretion are diminished--adding toxin to toxin until a disease producing Toxemia is built; and this is the alpha and omega of all diseases to which the flesh is said to be heir.

    The local irritation to the mucous membranes of the stomach and bowels by the toxin of decomposition builds catarrhal inflammation. This is how catarrh of the stomach and bowels is built, and the most pronounced symptoms are indigestion and constipation, with gas distention and general discomfort.

    The symptom-complex of Toxemia builds a vicious circle, which reads about as follows: Anything of a physical or mental character that irritates or overstimulates sooner or later enervates; enervation checks secretion and excretion; checked secretion impairs all organic functioning. The most vulnerable organ, the stomach, gives down first; hence food decomposes, toxin is evolved, the toxin irritates and inflames the mucous membranes, setting up catarrhal inflammation. Checked elimination adds toxin to the toxin absorbed from gastro-intestinal fermentation. In this way Toxemia is built. Toxemia is fed from the toxin absorbed from the fermentation of food in the intestines and retained excretions. When Toxemia is established, crises (diseases) make their appearance at any time when Toxemia reaches the saturation point. The saturation point is a state where resistance loses control, and any influence that enervates at this point precipitates whatever so-called disease there is an inclination to take on-any diathetic tendency. Those so-called diseases that are inherited or acquired become crises of Toxemia. Toxemia then should obviously be recognized by anyone as the true disease, and every other disease (so-called) only as a crisis of Toxemia.

    The most common crises are the catarrhal inflammations of mucous membranes. The stomach is the vulnerable organ of the body; the reason is that it is the portal or entry of supplies--of nutriment for the building and repair of the body. That this organ is abused by being overworked, all must admit; but if not enervated by the mind (nervous system) it can endure much abuse in being crowded with food.

    The stomach is the barometer (so to speak) of the nervous system. When the mind is depressed, or if there is an abnormal state of the emotions, the stomach shows the eff ect at once in failing to digest well. Enervation from any cause is quickly noticed by imperfect digestion. In overwork, worry, fear or anger, inability to digest follows. Babes at the breast, when disturbed by much fondling, handling, feeding, or subjected to noise, loud talking, music, and too much bathing, will soon show symptoms of restlessness and indigestion, which is followed by discomfort and more restlessness; and these symptoms excite the concern of the mother, who increases her vigilance, which means more attention, more excitement, and more enervation for baby and more indigestion. To this growing nerve storm a doctor is added, and he names the disease; his diagnosis of course has no relationship to cause and his prescription only adds to the medley of enervating causes.

    The above is a picture of the small beginning of a symptom-complex that may end in death in infancy or a neurasthenia as a cortex built around a nucleus of gastro-intestinal catarrh, distinguished by a touch-me-not stomach and constipated bowels. We will follow infancy, youth, manhood and age, keeping in mind the principal types, temperaments and diatheses, which cause variation in symptoms and ultimate endings.

    From the catarrh of the stomach the inflammation extends to the throat, nose, ears, bronchia, lungs; the so-called diseases resulting are tonsilitis, enlarged tonsils, adenoids, enlarged cervical glands, otorrhea, pharyngitis, laryngitis, bronchitis, and tuberculosis. The stomach itself presents inflammation, ulceration, pyloric diseases and cancer. Extending downward, the catarrh affects the duodenum, ending in ulceration, pancreatitis, and cancer; from the duodenum the catarrh extends to the bile-duct, gall bladder and liver, creating gall-stone; along the bowels to the colon and rectum, causing colitis, typhilitis, appendicitis, proctitis, piles, ulceration, prolapsus and cancer. Contiguous organs become infected. The ductless glands become involved. And where drainage of ducts and canals is imperfect, organs create much local disturbance, from ulceration and septic or pus infection.

    The popular treatment of disease is to treat these various organs as independent diseases, which is most absurd; as ridiculous as it would be to treat each separate hair on the head for an eczema of the scalp. Of course drainage must be established, and, with proper rest, proper feeding and fasting, nature will do the rest.

    Every so-called disease named above has the same origin, namely, enervation, causing deficient secretion and excretion, developing Toxemia; then mental and physical overstimulation keeps up enervation and the Toxemia; then the latter feeds from the blood. Every so-called disease is a vicious circle.

    Constipation is a prominent and quite constant symptom accompanying all the above-named crises, and, like all of them, will give way before a treatment that restores nerve energy and overcomes Toxemia--which establishes secretion and excretion. Rest, physical, physiological, and mental, is the most potent of all remedies, for disease rests on enervation.

    The time will come when the absurdity of the present so-called scientific treatment will provoke only a smile, when surprise will permit. Scientific medicine is so out of keeping with every other department of learning, and even with its own fundamentals, that the surprise is that educated men do not question their own sanity.

    A glance at the popular manner of treatment of the above crises should enable any layman to agree with the writer in declaring that the whole treatment of disease is a farce that should cause a high-school boy to blush were he guilty of so much unreasoning inanity.

    At the beginning of this pathological chain, the babe needs quiet only. It should be left alone, and fed only as it demands feeding, and not disturbed except to be kept clean; no handling, no fondling. Children are not to be handled like dolls or poodle-dogs. They are not for showing and to be made into a menagerie. Perhaps one mother in a hundred is fit for motherhood. When we have properly trained mothers, we can suspend with the use of improperly trained doctors.

    When maltreated until catarrh of the stomach and constipation are built, announced by frequent colds, excess feeding must be stopped, perfect quiet given and no handling allowed; a fast for a day or two may be needed, then feed one-fourth the usual amount and increase the food, not giving the full amount for a week. All symptoms will be gone, even the constipation, in seven to ten days. Don't overfeed, and don't keep the child sick by a worrying mother. Properly cared-for children will not have any of the diseases "peculiar to children." They must not be disturbed and constantly overfed.

    Tonsilitis could have no existence without chronic irritation of the throat-chronic hyperemia of the pharyngeal and nasal mucous membrane--from chronic catarrh of the stomach, kept alive by sugar, butter, and eating between meals. Butter in excess of systemic needs is often the cause of stomach derangement. Plain whole-wheat bread, well baked, with an apple or orange for breakfast, very little butter; bread and salad for noon, and bread and milk for night. No food, however, until the throat is well-comfortable and inflammation gone. Bathing, clean clothes and beds are necessary, as well as a poised mind and body from education in self-control. Play to the point of frenzy--great excitement--is bad. This treatment will appear lacking in the spectacular and thrills of modern medical science; but parents who prefer the thrills and frills and senseless operations, with gradually growing ill health, may pay their money and take their choice. No case is cured until the habits that build disease are corrected.

    The enlarged tonsils, adenoids, and constipation will gradually disappear under this treatment and the Toxemia will subside, leaving the children with normal resistance and full physical and mental efficiency. Enlarged glands and ear discharges go as they came; they need no surgery. Removing tonsils, adenoids, and tubercular glands without correcting habits that build them is stupidity.

    This treatment removes the first cause of tuberculosis, and when the first cause is removed the second is checkmated. Bronchitis and asthma are no different. Treatment for all so-called diseases is fundamentally the same.

    Keep food out of an ulcerated stomach, keep patient in bed, and give a lavage night and morning until comfortable.

    Pharyngitis, laryngitis, bronchitis and asthma are different locations of catarrhal inflammation extending from the stomach up through the esophagus (gullet) to these parts; infectious gas eructated from the stomach and exhaled from the lungs inflames the mucous membranes of the throat and air passages, and the topical irritation produced by the gas is reinforced by the toxin in the blood brought to the mucous membrane by the capillary circulation. To correct any of these inflammations, the Toxemia must be overcome.

    Disease is man-made, and he should rejoice in being able to rid himself of it. God did not make it, neither will He cure it. "Lovest thou me? Feed my sheep. Keep my commandments." It is up to us, not Him.

    Derangements of the stomach are always present and precede bowel derangements. Catarrh of the stomach is the first crisis of Toxemia. When the body is enervated from worry or anything that creates emotion it always affects the stomach and digestion. The stomach is also the first and last organ of the body to be abused. Food is put into it in season and out of season, and when its functions are inhibited by an enervated condition of the body its power to digest is lessened to such an extent that very few are willing to learn the amount of food they ingest to be within keeping with the digestive power, hence this is the continual source of indigestion. When food is not digested properly it ferments, and from this source toxin is developed, which, being absorbed, adds to the already toxemic condition of the blood. The continual irritation in the stomach of fermenting food is a source of irritation to the mucous membrane. Catarrh is created frequently before a child is a week old, and from a catarrhal condition of the stomach ulceration frequently takes place, and the end of chronic irritation, ulceration, etc., of the stomach is cancer. Sometimes it takes forty, fifty, or sixty years of abuse of the stomach to bring the cancerous ending.

    Scientists are busy a great deal of the time in endeavoring to find the germ that causes cancer. They can continue to look for it to the end of time, for cancer is not produced by germs any more than catarrh of the stomach is produced by germs, or, for that matter, any so-called disease of the entire body. The bacteria are in at every state of fermentation, but they are there simply because enzymic power is lost, secretions have been suppressed, and the real cause of the derangement is in operation all the time, producing general enervation of the body and more or less suppression of digestion.

    Catarrh of the stomach creates a great many symptoms: headache, discomfort in the region of the stomach, gas formation, sometimes a sick stomach where there will be vomiting and at other times a spitting up of food; at other times the principal symptom will be a harassing cough. The various catarrhal states gone over previous to this take their origin in the stomach. Ordinary discomforts of indigestion can be overcome by a reasonable fast and washing the stomach daily, and then the feeding should be very light to start with and increased as the powers to digest increases. Proper food combinations are very necessary, but the most necessary thing in taking care of the stomach is to limit the food so as to be within digestive power. This must necessarily vary a great deal in different cases. Each person is a law unto himself, and he must learn from discomfort what his limitations are. If after a meal there is discomfort, the next meal is to be missed, then when eating is resumed a less amount should be eaten, and in this way the individual will soon learn his food limitations and if he respects them, he will evolve into good, first-class health.

    Ulceration of the stomach is a state brought on from months and years of catarrh of the stomach. Continual fermentation with acid formation irritates the mucous membrane until it eventually ulcerates. Such cases require a very great deal of patience in bringing them back to the normal. One of the foolish things of our day is an operation to cut out the ulcer, turning the patient loose and advising him to eat "good wholesome food to keep up the strength." That is exactly what the patient has been doing all his life, and after the operation he resumes his former life and continues the stomach derangement that brought on the ulceration in the first place, and in time another portion of the mucous membrane will give down and ulcerate. Cutting out an ulcer is only getting rid of an effect, and another similar effect will follow and continue to follow until the patient is worn out from such folly.

    Disease of the pylorus is quite common. Why shouldn't it be? This excess of acid produced by fermentation passing out of the stomach through the pylorus continually irritates the lining membrane. The irritation brings on a thickening and hardening of the tissues. The time comes when the orifice is so closed from a gradual thickening of the parts that the food will not pass. Then scientific medicine gets busy and makes a new opening in the stomach and connects it with the intestine below, and the patient is again advised to eat "good wholesome food to keep up his strength." The same life is resumed that brought on the condition in the first place, and the irritation continues, and the thickened condition of the pylorus breaks down eventually into a cancerous state that ends the misery of the patient in a year or two; not one thing being done from the beginning to the end of the stomach derangement except palliation. Cause is not even recognized--not even suspected. Such patients should be put to bed, fasted for a sufficient time to bring on comfort and for the system to eliminate the Toxemia; then when the feeding is begun it should be of a liquid character and not enough to overpower the digestive functions, and the stomach should be cleaned out daily with a syphon. These cases can in the course of reasonable time be brought back to the normal.

    The people, however, are looking for quick cures--cures that can be performed without inconveniencing them by allowing them to continue in their old habits; and the consequences are that no one is ever cured. A few are palliated for a year or two and sometimes a little longer, but they all come to an untimely end simply because nothing is being done to remove the cause.

    Ulceration of the pylorus sometimes extends to the duodenum, and even the duodenum develops a cancer because the acid that passed from the stomach creates a catarrhal inflammation of this organ, and this catarrhal state will often extend to the pancreas. Where the disease is well developed in this organ it is very difficult to correct, and sometimes ends fatally in spite of the best treatment. The catarrhal condition passes from the duodenum to the gall-duct and gall bladder and the liver. All of these conditions are to be met in the same way. They do not need a different treatment, because they all come from one and the same cause, and they are all amenable to treatment that consists of a sufficient amount of rest of body, digestion, and mind to allow normality to be re-established.

    Colitis is simply an extension of this same catarrhal inclination, and when it has run on for a sufficient length of time ulceration will be established. In the meantime there may be appendicitis, typhilitis, and, farther on in the rectum, proctitis, which is catarrhal inflammation in the rectum, will be developed, followed by prolapsus, hemorrhoid ulceration, and cancer, which is the procession of diseases evolving from this same catarrhal state. None of these diseases require any special treatment. Patients are to be put to bed, fasted until they are in fit condition to eat, and then the eating must be limited to be within their power of digestion. Removing the appendix does not influence the colitis that initiated the appendicitis, but in possibly ninety out of every one hundred cases of so-called appendicitis the appendix is not involved at all; the derangement is all in the colon, and when the catarrhal inflammation has gone to such an extent that this organ has lost about all its power to digest, then any food that reaches this organ will be thrown into a state of fermentation; gas forms, which distends the colon and produces a very great deal of suffering. An inflamed stomach or intestine gives out much discomfort when distended with gas, and this is particularly true of colitis. So much distress comes from this source that every contiguous organ is blamed for the discomfort, hence the excuse for the removal of the appendix, the ovaries, removing the entire reproductive organs, draining the gall bladder, removing the gall bladder, and many other absolutely unnecessary operations. Nearly every organ in the abdominal cavity, as well as the pelvic cavity, is credited with the discomforts that are wholly due to colitis, and still the procession marches on to surgeries for these senseless and useless operations. I say the mutilation continues to such an extent that, if the people could realize it, the practice might be ended; but there is no danger of it ending, for the majority of people would rather submit to an operation than to take advice that inhibits their bad habits. They will submit to any kind of treatment if their habits of life are not interfered with. Hence the mortality is exceedingly great, because the treatment given only palliates for a few years, and the patients die from ten to forty years prematurely.

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