to treat with that digestive and
eliminative monarch, the Liver--usually at night-time, that the family
may not be disturbed. After making as good terms as possible they
journey on, riotously churning and swashing the long, tortuous canal
and its contents in search of ancient toxic gases and feces lodged in
the lower bowel. It is believed by the prescribers that the length of
the journey adds dignity to the drastic, dredging knights-errant. The
reader needs no introduction to the podophyllins, the aloes, the
jalaps, the rhubarbs, the mercurys, the croton oils, the sennas, the
salines, the seltzers, the Carters, the Beechams, the Websters, the
Pierces, the Ayers, the Ripans, the Warners, and others belonging to
"The Four Hundred" fashionable grenadiers, with their credentials and
stamp!

After these knights-errant have paid their respects to King Liver, and
ended their long, tortuous and eventful journey, they depart and leave
behind them burning and painful abdominal and anal regrets, and then
some soothing, stimulating and tonic remedies are in order, so that the
dredged though chronically constipated sufferer and his friends may
still hope that life will be spared to repeat the same nauseating and
often painful process in a few days or weeks, taking, in the meanwhile,
milder bile-bouncers daily as a reminder to King Liver that the time
for the knights-errant is coming again.

Sufferers from chronic constipation receive assurances that by the use
of these "remedies" the anemia will be corrected, nutrition and
digestion restored, atony of the liver and intestines overcome, yellow
complexion and morbid feeling disappear. In short, remove the numerous
symptoms and "causes" of toxicity of the body and of chronic
constipation, and proclaim the victory of Powder and Pill!

All of us would believe Medicus, the son who so abjectly follows in the
footsteps of his father, if we could really feel the possibility of
such a victory; but the protests of our bowels are living witnesses
against the validity of the medieval practice as here described; and we
ask for a modern scientific solution of the fulness and foulness within
and the fatuity without.

I must now apologize to the large class of sufferers from chronic
constipation for hurting their feelings. I know very well how seriously
they have been compelled to regard their trouble, and out of respect
for their protracted suffering and efforts to get relief I should
instead