endix. This time I advised the surgeon against the use of any
purgative, and he took my remarks so seriously that he did not even
allow an enema to be given. This time the patient showed no signs of
exhaustion and had very few gas pains. I firmly believe that the day
will soon come when a patient under operation, or a patient after
childbirth, will no longer be depleted by a weakening and dehydrating
cathartic and by a period of starvation, at a time when he needs all
the energy he can summon.

=Cathartics and Childbirth.= The article referred to in the "Journal
of the American Medical Association" cites the experiences of Dr. R.
McPherson of the Lying-in Hospital of New York, "who showed that the
routine purgation after confinement is not only useless but harmful.
Of 322 women who were not purged, only three had fever (and one of
them a mammary abscess); most of them had normal bowel movements and
those who did not were given an enema every third day. Of 322 women
who were delivered by the same technique and the same operators but
were purged in the usual routine manner, twenty-eight had some fever."
This experience of one physician is corroborated by that of others who
find that the more we tamper with the natural functions in time of
stress the harder do we make the recuperative process. There are
certainly times when catharsis is necessary but "one thing is certain,
the day for routine purgation is past."[54] Even in emergencies we
need to know why we administer cathartics and in chronic cases we may
be sure that they are always a mistake.

[Footnote 54: Ibid, p. 1286.]

="An Old Trick."= Before we make a practice of interfering with
Nature's processes, it is well to remember how old and stable those
processes are. As long as there has been the taking in of food, there
has been also the casting out of waste matter. The sea-anemone closes
in on the little mollusk that floats against its waving petals,
assimilates what it can and rejects the rest. In the long line from
sea-anemone to man, this automatic process of elimination has gone on
without a hitch, adapting itself with perfect success to the changing
habits of the varying types of life. So old a process is not easily
upset. And, be it noted, in the human body this automatic, involuntary
process still goes on with very little trouble until it reaches a
point in the body where man, the thinking animal, tries to control it
by conscious thought.

=A Question of