Hot water acts as a stimulant and antiseptic, as a sedative and as a food. Water at a temperature of 110° to 120°, or more, will nearly always relieve a foul stomach and intestines. It should be slowly sipped, so that the stomach may not be uncomfortably distended. After imbibing a pint or a pint and a half, wait for fifteen or thirty minutes to give it time to pass into the bowels, then drink more if thought advisable. Drink it an hour before meal-time. It will excite downward peristalsis, will dilute the foul contents of the stomach, and will thus aid the escape of these contents into the intestines, which latter require the washing process as well. Sometimes it is a good thing to omit one, two or three meals while the washing process is being continued. Commence treatment with pure hot water. To make it appetizing, add a pinch of salt or of bicarbonate of soda; with children add sugar. It will pay you to follow this treatment for the cleansing of the alimentary canal. The vitality of the body may be sustained for days and weeks on water alone; there is therefore no hurry about food. If human beings would only keep their bowels and stomachs clean they would avoid all the ills that flesh is heir to, except, of course, those due to accident. My remarks have been confined to irrigation _per orem_ (that is, by way of the mouth), and nothing has been said of irrigation _per anum_ (by injection), since I have treated the latter subject fully in several previous chapters, to which the reader is referred. Be sure to follow the counsel there given, and use the enema two or three times a day in moderate quantities as indicated. CHAPTER XXVI. PROPER TREATMENT FOR DISEASES OF THE ANUS AND RECTUM VERY ESSENTIAL. No doubt the readers of the preceding chapters on proctitis and its numerous symptoms--noted under separate headings--would like to know something about the home treatment for such an insidious and grave disease. Every sufferer wants to be a self-doctor. This commendable desire it is usually impossible to put into practice. If physicians so often fail to cure the ailments I have described, what can be expected of those who have no knowledge at all of diagnosis and treatment?