The practice of preparing patients for operation by a course of purgatives, emetics, etc., is based upon the recognition of certain principles. The general symptoms included under the name _enterosepsis_, _stercoremia_, _copremia_, are due to the activity of the colon bacillus, which seems to be made more virulent by certain conditions of diet or retained fecal excretions, and to such an extent that it wanders widely from its normal habitat and may be found in distant parts of the body. _Enterosepsis may be mistaken for surgical fever_, and is to be distinguished from it, perhaps, only by the study of the excretions of a case and establishing the fact that they are free, and that consequently pyrexia, etc., cannot be due to diminished elimination. Aside from the migrations of the colon bacillus, it is also possible for auto-intoxication to occur. Thus that which is stercoremia one day may later become a genuine septicemia, vital resistance being so lowered as to permit of local infection. The various conditions are so often merged that it is difficult to separate and identify them. Nevertheless, enterosepsis differs from sapremia in that in the one instance the putrefying material is contained within a normal cavity, whereas in sapremia it is contained within an abnormal cavity, in either case corresponding to a _septic suppository_, varying, however, in the place of insertion, also in the nature of the surrounding tissues, which in the latter case are more capable of absorption and of becoming infected than in the former.