When will these prescribers and partakers ever learn that bile bouncers and peristaltic persuaders have an immense journey before them when they start to remove the foul accumulation of feces from the sigmoid flexure and ballooned rectum? For, be it remembered, the normal receptacle for feces is twenty-four feet four inches from the stomach, and the abnormal receptacle twenty-four feet eleven inches--within two inches of the vent of the body! Surely quite a degree of mental constipation must have existed in both the prescribers and the partakers to think such thick and dense thoughts as are represented by these bouncers and persuaders. So you would _cleanse_ the bowels with such unclean, poisonous, and irritating things! What amazing hope born of ignorance! Outraged Nature cries: “How long! how long! how long will my ‘inards’ be so abused in the name of cleanliness and yet remain so unclean? Ye benighted mortals, if ye would listen to me, your Mother, I would give ye a pure and wholesome prescription, for I would prescribe equal parts of enlightenment and water well mixed, and advise ye to take a portion of it fore and a portion of it aft, per os (mouth) and per anus. Thus and thus alone would I prescribe for ye; such and such alone is the way for ye to do; purify to cure, or cure by purifying.” Constipation must not continue, for it means not only the clogging up of the large intestine with the foul sewage of the system, but also the drying of that sewage, which latter process implies the absorption of poison. Now that you are in this condition, Medicus steps up and prescribes a cathartic mixed with belladonna or opium, or both. These latter are meant to quiet the mournful cry of outraged Nature when the cathartic invades its sacred precincts. And it may be noted, by the way, that though belladonna, atropine, morphia, etc., tend to dry up the secretions of the mucous membrane and make matters worse by making them still more arid, still the action of the cathartic is usually so powerful that after the free fight with the pain soothers it triumphs, and produces a free flow of watery secretion into the dried, impacted mass of the bowel.