Chronic constipation is the result of…
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.
