The mass may be so enormous as to press upon any organ located in the abdomen, interfering with its functions; thus we may have pressure on the liver that arrests the flow of bile; or, upon the urinary organs, crippling their functions.
Of course, such excessive accumulations occur only exceptionally, and it is not to these that attention is particularly drawn, because when they are so excessive, any physician can detect them by palpation (touch).
It is to the minor accumulations particularly, that I wish to draw attention--the accumulations that we see in the majority of patients who visit our offices. Such patients assure us that the bowels move daily, but the color of their complexions, and the condition of their tongues, are enough to assure us that they are the victims of costiveness.
Daily movements of the bowels are no sign that the colon is not impacted; in fact, the worst cases of costiveness that we ever see are those in which daily movements of the bowels occur. The diagnosis of fæcal accumulations is facilitated by inquiring as to the color of the daily discharges. A black or a very dark green color almost always indicates that the fæces are ancient. Prompt discharge of food refuse is indicated by more or less yellow color. It would be interesting to inquire why fresh fæces are yellow and ancient fæces are dark.
Such patients have digestive fermentations to torment them, resulting in flatulent distension which encroaches on the cavity of the chest, which in excessive cases may cause short and rapid breathing, irregular heart action, disturbed circulation in the brain, with vertigo and headache. An over-distended cæcum, or sigmoid flexure, from pressure, may produce dropsy, numbness or cramps in the right or left lower extremity.
The reports of the _post-mortem_ examination of the colons of hundreds of subjects reveals a series of horrors more weird and ghastly than were ever penned by Eugene Sue, or Emile Zola. The mind shrinks in dismay at the appalling revelations, and shudders at the possibility of the “human form divine” becoming such a peripatetic charnel house.
Is it any wonder that the average human system, being thus saturated with impurities, should succumb to the first exciting cause? Is it not, in fact, a greater marvel that the rate of mortality is not even higher than at present?