Colon Hygiene; Comprising New and Important Facts Concerning the Physiology of the Colon and an Account of Practical and Successful Methods of Combati

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1915 edition. Excerpt: ... Bowel Habits of Uncivilized Man Civilized human beings have departed so far from natural primitive modes of life, and have adopted so many unphysiologic practices, that it is quite impossible from the conventional usages of civilized people, to form any just conclusion of what are natural or biologic modes of life for human beings. This is particularly true of customs and habits in relation to human alimentation. From a study of the modern hotel bill of fare one could not possibly obtain even a suggestion of man's primitive and biologic diet. The natural conclusion would be that man is a universal feeder, since the average hotel menu presents practically everything that any animal eats; but biology teaches us that man is naturally frugivorous, and science offers no reason why he should have departed from his original bill of fare, to which his nearest relatives, the anthropoid apes, the chimpanzee, the orangoutang and the gorilla, living in their native forest, still scrupulously adhere. Man has not only developed wrong habits in relation to the kind of food he eats, but has become unbiologic in almost every phase of his daily life. Constipation is simply one of the natural consequences of these perversions. It is scarcely too much to say that the average civilized man is the victim of chronic constipation. If his bowels move once a day, or even once in two days, he feels that his condition is very satisfactory; whereas Cannon, in his work entitled "The Mechanical Factors of Digestion," has shown that practically all the digestible food taken at an ordinary meal is digested and absorbed within eight or nine hours from the time it is eaten, and the unuseable residue is at the end of this period found deposited in the colon, ready for...