geared to discharge its contents downward, the simplest and easiest
thing is to turn in a hurry call and cut down the normal schedule from
hours to minutes, with the familiar result of an acute diarrh[oe]a.

Both vomiting and purging are defensive actions on nature's part,
remedies instead of diseases. Yet we are continually regarding and
treating them as if they were diseases in themselves. Nothing could be
more irrational than to stop a diarrh[oe]a before it has accomplished
its purpose. Intelligent physicians now assist it instead of trying to
check it in its early stages; and paradoxical as it may sound, laxatives
are often the best means of stopping it. It is only the excess of this
form of nature's house-cleaning which needs to be checked. Many of the
popular Colic Cures, Pain-Relievers, and "Summer Cordials" contain opium
which, while it relieves the pain and stops the discharge, simply locks
up in the system the very poisons which it was trying to get rid of.
Laxatives, intestinal antiseptics, and bowel irrigations have almost
taken the place of opiates in the treatment of these conditions in
modern medicine. We try to help nature instead of thwarting her.

Supposing that the poison be of more insidious form, a germ or a
ptomaine, for instance, which slips past these outer "firing-out"
defenses of the food-tube and arouses no suspicion of its presence until
it has been partially digested and absorbed into the blood. Again,
resourceful nature is ready with another line of defense. It was for a
long time a puzzle why every drop of the blood containing food and its
products absorbed from the alimentary food-canal had to be carried,
often by a most roundabout course, to and through the liver, before it
could reach any part of the general system. Here was the largest and
most striking organ in the body, and it was as puzzling as it was large.
We knew in some crude way that it "made blood," that it prepared the
food-products for use by the body-cells, and that it secreted the bile;
but this latter secretion had little real digestive value, and the other
changes seemed hardly important enough to demand that every drop of the
blood coming from the food-tube should pass through this custom-house.
Now, however, we know that in addition to its other actions, the liver
is a great poison-sponge or toxin-filter, for straining out of the blood
poisonous or injurious materials absorbed from the food, and converting
them into h