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