which gives an additional insult to the intestinal wall,
spurs it on to a desperate effort, and hastens the cleansing process.
In severe cases the more promptly the castor-oil is administered the
better. Such emergency measures are very different from the habitual
use of insulting drugs.]

Sometimes the wrong kind of bacteria do persist, causing anemia,
rheumatism, sciatica, or neuritis. When these disorders are not the
result of infection from teeth, tonsils, or other sources of poison,
but are really caused by intestinal bacteria, I have found that a diet
of buttermilk (lactic acid bacteria), with turnip-tops or spinach to
supply the necessary mineral salts, often succeeds in planting the
right bacteria and driving out the disturbing ones. These disorders
are invasions from without, like tuberculosis or malaria, and are as
likely to attack the person with easy bowel movements as the one with
the most chronic constipation.

=Autointoxication.= A good deal of the talk about autointoxication is
just talk. It sounds well and affords an easy explanation for all
sorts of ills, but in a large majority of cases the diagnosis can
hardly be substantiated. Uninformed writers of newspaper articles on
the care of the body, or purveyors of purgatives or apparatus for
internal baths are fond of dilating on the "foulness of the colon" as
a leading cause of disease. As a rule, they advise either a strict
diet, some kind of cathartic, or an elaborate process of washing out
the colon to clear the body of its terrible accumulation of poisons.

=Cathartics and Enemas.= He who makes a practice of flushing out his
intestinal tract with high enemas and internal baths is like a person
who eats a good dinner and then proceeds to wash out his stomach. In
the mistaken idea that he is making himself clean, he is washing what
was never intended to be washed and robbing the body of the nutrition
which it needs. And the man who persists in the pill habit is making a
worse mistake, adding insult to injury and forcing the mucous membrane
to toughen itself against such malicious attacks.

=Cathartics and Operations.= Even in emergencies, the use of
purgatives as a routine measure is happily decreasing year by year.
For many years I have deplored the use of purgatives before and after
operations. That other practitioners are coming to the same conclusion
is witnessed by a number of papers recently read in medical societies
condemning purgation at th