Natural Hemorrhoids Treatment

From The New England Journal of Medicine
The subject of this book worries everyone in one way or another. When nature calls regularly, one will have to be grateful. But when such calls are irregular and one suffers from headache, distention of the abdomen, disagreeable breath, and furred tongue, then something has to be done. According to 18th-century doctors, kept bile would cause fever, in the 19th century putrefaction and bacterial infection were feared, and now we are scared by autointoxication and cancer.

The faith that held feces may poison the body has a long history. A passage in the Ebers papyrus proposes that undigested feed gives rise to toxicant substances that overflow into the body and initiate putrefaction in critical organs. Similar ideas are to be found in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Germ theory transformed the aftermaths of constipation into an even more outstanding menace: autointoxication. By the 1880s, it had become apparent that bacteria decompose proteins in the big intestine into a number of compounds that have pronounced toxicity when injected into animals. Despite the lack of scientific proof that these substances are actually absorbed from the colon into the circulation, the conception of autointoxication turned out to be of outstanding importance in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Ever since antiquity, well-timed evacuation and repletion have been considered one of the six res non naturales, along with air and light, feed and drink, sleep and watching, motion and rest, and the passions of the mind. In each case, health was to be achieved by moderation, regularity, and the remainder of opposites. Constipation viewed in contrast to cleanliness was likewise a leading idea in the procedure of civilization.

Filth was omnipresent in urban life before the sanitation-reform movement. Putrefaction and foul smell foreshadowed disease, decay, and death. Feces were seen — and smelled — in “nightstools” (whence the usual euphemistic term was derived), in chamber pots and privies, and in cesspools and the streets, and it was natural to suspect that the retention of this material in the body would have bad effects. Street cleaning and drainage, the remotion of refuse, and the construction of effective sewer systems, including the toilet, promoted not only environmental cleanliness but also loathing and fear of each kind of filth. The idea of a coexisting inner rottenness and outer cleanliness was hardly tolerable. Thus, the counterpart of sanitation reform as a medical and political motion was the person fight versus constipation, the “mother of all diseases.”

It was commodious to suspect civilization as the cause of constipation. Since the last third of the 18th century, Europeans and Americans had been made intently conscious of the widening gulf amongst their manner of living and that of their ancestors. There were numerous dangers in modern life, including lack of time to obey the call of nature. The fight versus constipation became the centerpiece of attempts to counter the debilitating effects of urban life, not only by means of purgatives, enemas, irrigation, and even surgery but likewise through massage, ingestion of “roughage” and black bread, and perfective mastication.

James Whorton, a professor in the Department of Medical History and Ethics at the University of Washington in Seattle, has analyzed a host of British and American roots on the costive bowel. He explores the theories and exercises of intestinal purity, a subject that, taking into account it is prominence in medical and usual culture from antiquity to the present, he considers the most neglected factor in the history of hygiene. After establishing the context in two chapters when it comes to the 19th century, Whorton concentrates his discussion on the 20th century. Six chapters thoroughly question the amount of time from 1900 to 1940, when the theory of autointoxication was at it is zenith and prominent physicians were it is propagators. The two final chapters fetch us to the end of the 20th century, when the old idea was revived as the basis for the dietary-fiber motion in the fight versus colon cancer, scientifically supported by the “bran man,” Denis Burkitt (1911-1993), a surgeon, oncologist, and epidemiologist.

A arousing and attention holding and well-documented story that is fluently written, now and then with a wink and on occasion with humor, Inner Hygiene is at once a record of timeless hypochondriacal preoccupation and an instructive account of the evolution of medical thought and it is shaping of popular beliefs regarding health and behavior. The author has done his occupation “in as cleanly a Manner, as the Dirtiness of the Theme will admit,” and there is no doubt that his book will leave the reader with a very salutary “bowel consciousness” if not “bowel wisdom.”

Urs Boschung, M.D.
Copyright © 2000 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. The New England Journal of Medicine is a registered trademark of the MMS.

Review

“This scholarly tome is a major addition to the growing body of social history of medicine/health care creative writing of recognized artisti value and a very gratifying reading experience.” –Pharmacy in History

About the Author
James C. Whorton is at University of Washington.

Inner Hygiene explores the severe health threat of constipation, and discusses the extraordinary assortment of preventive and curative measures that have been invented to save people from the toxic effects of intestinal regularity. The book examines the evolution over the last two centuries of the faith that constipation is a impairment of normal physiological function brought on by an unnatural life style of urban, industrial society. Particular attention is given to the a good deal of constipation therapies that humans have used, including laxatives, enemas, solid homogeneous inorgani substance waters, bran cereals, yogurts, electrotherapy, calisthenics, rectal dilation devices, and galore other remedies. The story is carried up to the present and demonstrates that some of constipation therapies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are continuing into the twenty-first.

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1820198 in Books
• Published on: 2000-04-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .81″ h x 6.14″ w x 9.21″ l, 1.44 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 344 pages

Inner Hygiene Constipation Pursuit Society Image

Inner Hygiene Constipation Pursuit Society Image

Inner Hygiene Constipation Pursuit Society Image

Inner Hygiene Constipation Pursuit Society Picture

Inner Hygiene Constipation Pursuit Society Image

Inner Hygiene Constipation Pursuit Society Photo

Inner Hygiene Constipation Pursuit Society Image

Inner Hygiene Constipation Pursuit Society Image