Sir William Arbuthnot Lane has said that ninety per cent, of all chronic disease comes from constipation, so if we were to accept this dictum as final we would feel that we are cornering nearly all the chronic disease, for he evidently referred to the chronic and so-called degenerative or toxic diseases of which he was speaking when he made this sweeping statement.

This is scarcely a fair statement, however, for what causes constipation? This is not a condition that just grows, like the immortal Topsy, for it has to have a train of preceding conditions before it can appear.

That it is a cause, and a very important cause, of the toxic train of chronic diseases goes without saying, for this must be self-evident when we consider the enormous opportunity for fermentation and putrefaction in the colon of forty-eight hours delinquency.

Still if we attribute to the colon the chief role in furnishing material for the creating of a toxic state, we are still under the necessity of finding out why the colon should reach such a state of helplessness.

If you will remember what was said in the last chapter in regard to digestive enervation it is then much plainer to understand, for the gradual failure of nerve force is back of constipation just as it is back of every other functional or organic failure that heralds disease.

Back of enervation is acid intoxication, from food mistakes, so we are again back at the original starting point, and we see that the functional activity of the colon depends on the degree of nerve force with which it is supplied daily, and that this nerve force is depleted continually by self-created poisons from wrong habits of food selection and combination.

So we are forced back to the original statement that THE cause of disease is food habits.

As the colon begins to lag behind with its work, as the interval grows ever longer between the time food reaches the colon and the time before it is dejected, the degree of toxicity of its contents is certain to deepen, from fermentation and putrefaction.

Let an egg lie in the sun till putrefaction sets in and note that each day the odor gets more and more putrid till the saprophytic germs of the air have finally done their work and the egg is no more, resolved back again into its original components, dissociated by these beneficient little workers in the field of sanitation till there is no longer anything left to identify as egg.

It is even so inside the colon, for the work of destruction goes on to completion inside this depository just the same as outside it, and the odors are evidence of the liberation of hydrogen disulphide, or sulphuretted hydrogen, a by-product of the putrefaction of protein anywhere inside or outside the body.

Now this work of reduction is a beneficent process, but till the work is completed there are many depressing and very toxic byproducts of decomposition generated, and these are subject to absorption just as are the food materials, and we suffer accordingly.

If meat or other flesh or protein food is decomposing in the colon, it gives to the stool this same putrid odor, and as this is absorbed into the body the perspiration, the breath and all excreta are bound to testify to the presence in the body of this decomposition, and the urine is very apt to carry indican, or indoxyl, showing this very same thing.

So the colon is a source of intoxication, as no one should attempt to deny, yet it is not fair to call this in any sense a cause of toxic state, rather it is the means of intoxication most in evidence.

To render a body less toxic quickly it is of great assistance to empty this cesspool daily and so keep it empty, thus relieving the body of this continual reabsorption that results from a too long retention of material that should long ago have been dejected from the body.

This can be done in no harmless and effective way except through the daily use of the enema, an instrument of sanitation that is grossly misunderstood, because not properly used, as a rule.

You have no doubt heard it said that if you begin the use of the enema you will always have to keep on with it, as it takes out of the bowel all its resiliency and reaction to its contents, and perhaps this would be true if one were to use it always quite warm and continue to remove all of the contents daily, just as a leg that is lame will not recover its full usefulness unless one makes it work sometime, and if crutches are used indefinitely, or if one were to lie in bed to save the leg from work, then it would be all too true that its function would not return permanently or completely.

This would be the wrong way to use the enema, for it should consist of three quarts of tepid or slightly cool water, the entire three quarts to be injected at one time, to distend thoroughly and thus empty the colon for the first two weeks, the length of time usually required to unload the entire contents of the average torpid colon, and after this to be reduced to two quarts, retained for two or three minutes, while the abdomen is deeply and vigorously massaged to insure the penetration of this water into every part of the colon without putting this daily on the stretch.

Thus, the colon can be emptied without robbing it of any of its own vitality, and if the juice of one lemon is added to this two quarts of water, it imparts a kick to the colon that helps it to come back to greater activity, at the same time neutralising much of the medium that offers the best breeding ground for the anaerobic bacteria that infest the colon, and whose presence there is made necessary by the retention daily of this material that can be destroyed in no other way than through germ activity.

For twenty years the writer has studied by means of the fluoroscope and the x-ray film the effects of the daily enema, and he has yet to see evidences of the least harmful effect, and the regularity with which constipated patients report a return after several months' use of the enema to the normal three movements a day is pretty good proof that the effects of a proper enema are salutary, rather than otherwise.