But of the nature of the disease that had occasioned its use, both layman and physician were, and for the most part are, ignorant. Local obstruction and discomfort were sufficient to suggest this mode of relief; yet no truly scientific inquiry seems to have been instituted to discover the cause of the obstruction. The author, during an experience of over twenty-three years as a specialist in diseases of the bowels, rectum, and anus, has found the true cause, namely, PROCTITIS; that is, the chronic inflammation (dating often from infancy and childhood) of the anus, rectum, and frequently of a portion of the sigmoid flexure and colon. Proctitis is practically the universal cause of chronic constipation. Victims of constipation have more or less haphazardly resorted to the enema as a ready means of relief--a recourse that was often, nay generally, against the advice of their medical counselor: a professional opposition that indicates either ignorance, mistaken judgment, or fear of losing a profitable patient. But the layman has not been uniformly wise. He is an experimenter on his own hook--encouraged in his experiments by the most promising and seductive of advertisements in the whole gamut of advertising. He experimented on his organism, tinkering it now with cathartics or purgatives of multiform nature, and again with digestive and other agents. This tinkering habit seems to have become all but universal with civilized man. Constipation--which is caused by proctitis--will, of course, bring indigestion and biliousness and diarrhea and nervousness and headache and a host of other maladies in its train; all of these induce the civilizee to increase his tinkering with his divine abode until it eventually falls in ruins. The tinkerer loses sight of the fact that his abode is not a body like the bodies of wood, stone, and iron that he handles and putters with daily; he forgets or ignores the fact that it is a vital organic machine, which, when tinkered too much, will stop, “never to go again.” It is poor consolation when you have reached your last gasp, after a chronic invalidism, to feel that you have done the best you knew how. You have not sought the cause, nor, having learned it somehow, sought to remove or avoid it. For the last four hundred years this tinkering, this futile medication, has been kept up at a furious pace without even a hope of permanent cure. Poor, outraged human nature dimly knew that it was simply doctoring a symptom, a _consequence_ of something or other--for that is all that constipation and its host of symptoms really are.