THE PHYSICS OF DIGESTION AND EGESTION.
A tree is simply an extension from its roots; and, in an analogous
manner, man's body may be said to be an extension from the alimentary
canal. Does it not follow, consequently, that the digestive apparatus,
from a physiological point of view, is the most important organ of the
human body? It must be prime and paramount because all other organs
depend upon it: it provides them with nourishment for preservation and
improvement, and it punishes them--if they do not mind the laws of
normality--by withholding its gifts, or by presenting these gifts in
the form of poisons that impoverish, hinder and degenerate the system
of organs. Uncleanliness is surely one of the chief ways in which
physiological thoughtlessness is exhibited, and due punishment will
inevitably follow disobedience.
Foodstuffs are prepared for assimilation in the alimentary laboratory
through the process of normal fermentation. Is it not essential,
therefore, that the connecting canals and receptacles be cleansed of
the fermented debris that may remain unused and unexpelled, before more
food be taken by the digestive apparatus? The all-important question
is:--How soon and how well have the residuary part of the food (for
some part will always be undigested or unassimilated), and the waste
resulting from worn-out tissues of the various organs, been eliminated
from the system? Wisdom declares that it is not so much what we eat,
but what and how well we eliminate, that decides the issues of health
and disease. Do the egesta pass out in the form of normal feces? Three
times in twenty-four hours foodstuffs are taken, and as many times the
bowels should be freed of accumulated excrement and gases. Does Nature
have her way, or do neglect and bad habits rule the assimilative and
eliminative functions of the bowels?
The habit of storing feces for twenty-four hours ought to concur and
keep pace with a habit of eating one meal in the same period. Household
and laboratory receptacles in which fermentation has occurred are
emptied and cleaned before fresh material is put into them. Is not the
same precaution more essential with the receptacles for digestion and
egestion? They constitute our chief physiological economy; they are
precious household and laboratory utensils; exceedingly precious, as we
can purchase no other set when these are worn and wasted beyond repair.
What marvelous possessions, and how reckless most of us are with them!
Neither love nor money will bring another "body"-house to us when this
decays; when poisons or parasites infest it as the result of a
pernicious diathesis, of debasing, destructive tendencies; in short, of
unmindfulness!
Too often criminal negligence or the lack of proper convenience has
brought on the habit of using the intestinal canal as a storehouse for
dried feces, and the glands and blood-vessels as reservoirs for the
absorbed fluid poisons from the feces that have been stored and thus
dried. This baneful habit is general throughout civilized communities.
It is this habit that has made the words "constipation," "indigestion,"
"diarrhea," etc., familiar and household subjects of complaint. Medical
writers agree that "constipation" is the most common malady that
afflicts mankind; but they are also unanimous in preposterously
attributing the cause to the abnormal action of the liver and the
secondary symptoms of constipation.
Chronic constipation is the result of proctitis and colitis. Proctitis,
the inflammation of the rectal and anal canals, is the most common
disease that afflicts the human creature from infancy to old age; and
colitis is only the extension of proctitis to the colon.
The scientific diagnosis of constipation predicates proctitis and
sometimes colitis. It is declared that constipation is its primary
symptom; and that diarrhea is one of its secondary symptoms, resulting
from constipation. There is a legion of secondary symptoms of
proctitis, all of which medical empiricism considers and denominates
causes. As constipation is such an every-day complaint of almost
everybody one meets, it will not tax our imagination unduly to conceive
how it may be a frequent cause of diarrhea, which is only Nature's
effort to get rid of its useless and excessive burden of retained feces
and gases. Constipation, semi-constipation, and irregular action of the
bowels, excessive fermentation, putrefaction, self-generated or
auto-infection, are the factors to be considered. It is to be noted
that in many cases diarrhea is simply an increased peristalsis of the
bowels, often due to local and diffused irritation and often to
inflammation of the mucous membrane (not infrequently with ulceration);
all of these may be the outcome of fecal impaction.
To make intelligible the physics of the digestive and egestive
processes, we must understand the apparatus. One would naturally think
that were the bends or curves of the large intestine undone, it would
be found to be a long, straight, smooth canal or bore like a rubber
tube. But such is not the case. The outer muscular longitudinal bands
are much shorter than the musculo-areolo-mucous tube, an arrangement
which brings about a transverse puckering of the gut and mucous
membrane, thus forming valves, folds, sacs or pouches at short
intervals along the canal. These transverse folds or valves inhibit the
too hasty passage of the feces along the bowels by checking and
retaining the egested product in the large recesses or pools between
the folds; they thus serve as so many dams in the passage of feces
toward elimination. This wise provision of Nature to moderate the
steady motion of the feces as they proceed toward the sigmoid flexure
or receptacle, to wait there till there is a proper stimulus for
expulsion, is wofully abused by man. He is quite willing to take
foodstuffs three or four times a day, to fill the long row of
intestinal pools between the dams with feces and gases in all stages of
decomposition, not dreaming of the danger from developing bacteria and
their absorption into the system.
Really he is inclined to eat at all times, yet begrudges a few minutes
spent in a hurried effort to perform the act of defecation once in
twenty-four hours. Some of us even have our minds absorbed in reading
while awaiting an "automatic action" of the bowels. What a contrast
between the gusto and time spent in taking foodstuffs and the
indifference and indolence regarding the action of the bowels, unless
indeed severe biliousness or diarrhea reminds us strongly of our sewer
of waste products.
An attack of acute or chronic diarrhea is the penalty some pay for long
inattention to the demands nature makes for intestinal cleanliness
three times in twenty-four hours. Constipated people, semi-constipated
people, irregular people and twenty-four-hour people, are not healthy.
They are constantly being poisoned by the abnormal products of
indigestion and putrefaction resulting from fecal stagnation, which
products enter the blood and circulate through every tissue of the
body.
All cases of proctitis are more or less accompanied by constipation and
diarrhea. In all cases of chronic constipation I have found proctitis,
and often colitis, and am forced to believe it is the most common and
proximate cause of chronic constipation of the bowels. Constipation
being a primary symptom, there must of necessity follow numerous
secondary symptoms, of which diarrhea well marks the progress of septic
infection. Some of the symptoms of infection are headache, megrim,
vertigo, dyspepsia, foul tongue and mouth, back-aches, stiff neck,
gnawing pain or numb feeling at the lower end of the spine,
biliousness, bad odor from breath and skin, muddy complexion, cold
hands and feet, jaundice, neurasthenia, loss of memory, drowsy feeling,
pernicious anemia, emaciation, flabby obesity with pallor, capricious
appetite, fits of great mental depression, palpitation of the heart,
bloating of the stomach and bowels, disturbance of the kidneys, liver,
lungs and mucous membrane in general, and especially chronic rhinitis
and pharyngitis, which latter are among the first symptoms of imperfect
alimentary excretion.
As auto-intoxication (that condition of the system when it is
continually poisoned, usually by one's own excretions) gains the
mastery of the vital forces at any period of life, the mucous membranes
are likely to be first affected by inflammation of catarrhal character;
then the serous membranes of the body. Mal-assimilation, mal-nutrition,
cell-atrophy, are symptoms of the giving way of the vital energies to
the invasion of the filth and bacterial poisons absorbed from the
intestinal canal.
On the inner surface of the alimentary canal, from the stomach to the
colon, there are, it is estimated, over 20,000,000 rootlets (called
glands, lacteals, follicles, villi), which take up intestinal juices as
roots of a plant take sap from the soil. These millions of rootlets
give a velvety appearance to the alimentary canal, like a nap or downy
surface. Intestinal rootlets of the small intestines, like vegetal
rootlets, demand a certain amount of normal fluid and solid substance,
free from noxious gas. It is the down or nap of fabrics, and not their
body, that shows damage first. So it is with the frail structure of
vegetal and animal life if not properly supplied with nourishment from
day to day. There is probably in the vegetal bodies a continuous
circulation of sap corresponding to the digestive circulating fluids of
the alimentary canal. This circulation from the alimentary canal to the
blood-vessels, and from the blood-vessels to the alimentary canal,
involves a wonderful mechanism, facilitating the flow of several
gallons daily from each to the other during the process of
metamorphosis of food into flesh. You can thus see how inevitable it is
that the functions of these millions of secreting and excreting
rootlets will be disturbed by the clogging of the system with filth and
bacterial poisons as a consequence of chronic constipation, biliousness
and general foulness of the alimentary canal. Through such disturbance
nutrition is diminished, cell-atrophy progresses, and emaciation
becomes more marked. The progressive destruction of these rootlets,
involving the pathological change indicated, will be manifest in one of
its results, either costiveness or diarrhea.
Often the power of properly digesting and absorbing the foodstuffs is
so greatly diminished that the alimentary canal is about as useless as
a soft rubber tube. Millions on millions of these glands, lacteals and
follicles in the stomach and small intestines, are destroyed like the
rootlets of a plant or tree in unwholesome soil. The active circulation
of the digestive fluids ceases, and the sufferer is said to be costive
or to have chronic diarrhea. Both symptoms are the outgrowth of many
years of intestinal foulness, and indicate the degree and character of
intestinal irritability and semi-starvation of the body, as a
consequence of either the absorption of poisons or the excessive
elimination of the vital substance of the body through diarrhea.