American woman's affliction. It is a curious
commentary on the intelligence of the American people, who are
ordinarily alert and analytical, to realize how few of them really know
how serious a matter constipation is. They don't know because they have
given the matter absolutely no thought. They have accepted it as a mere
matter of fact, almost of fate.

INCOMPLETE CONSTIPATION.--There is a type of constipation that is not
known to the average person and not well understood by those few who
know of its existence. In this form of constipation there is a daily
bowel movement but the movement is not complete. The bowel does not
thoroughly empty itself; it has established this habit because of
conditions under which it has had to do its work. If a woman
neglects herself, becomes muscularly inactive, does not take
proper out-door exercise, grows fat and lazy, eats irregularly and
indiscriminately,--the bowel suffers with the rest of the system. The
woman may have a healthy appetite, may eat the wrong things at the wrong
time, yet the bowel is supposed to go on acting rightly, but it does
not. It, too, becomes lazy and acquires bad habits, and this form of
incomplete constipation is the result. These patients look healthy and
get little sympathy for any pains they may have. They may even gain in
weight; they get headaches once in a while, and if they go shopping or
visiting they don't feel quite well afterward. They are suffering from
the effects of chronic constipation, though their bowels are apparently
regular. They are marching onward toward apoplexy or Bright's disease of
the kidney.

IMPORTANCE OF A CLEAN BOWEL.--Every mother, sooner or later, observes
that a physician always thoroughly cleans out the bowel of a sick child
at once, no matter what the character of the sickness is. He does this
for two reasons,--first, because he knows that the great majority of
children's ailments are of gastro-intestinal origin; second, if the
origin of the disease is not in the stomach or bowels, experience has
taught him that if the bowels are clean at the beginning of a disease,
that disease will run a milder and shorter course than if complicated
with a condition of self-poisoning. If a child develops fever the
digestive function stops; whatever food is in the stomach or bowel will
promptly ferment and putrefy because of the abnormal heat caused by the
fever and the arrested digestion. If this is not cleaned out at once the
self-