=A Fifty-year Habit.= Another old lady was not quite so easily convinced.  She ridiculed the idea that her son of fifty, who had been “constipated in his cradle” could be cured of his lifelong habit, but he was cured.  As long as there is life and the light of reason, so long may Nature’s functions be reestablished.

=The Whole Family.= Nor is any one too young to learn.  A tiny baby is easily taught.  There came to me for two consultations a mother and her two babies, all three constipated.  The four-year-old child, mentally deficient, had been fed on milk of magnesia from his infancy, and the four-months-old baby had been started on the same path.  I explained to the mother the mechanism of elimination, told her to give up cathartics, and to set a regular time for herself and the baby, but was a little dubious about the mentally deficient four-year-old.  However she soon reported that they had all three promptly acquired the new habit.  Four years later she told me that they had never had any more trouble.

=A Record History.= When Miss H. first came to my house, she told a story that was almost incredible.  She said that for many months she had been taking eight tablespoonfuls of mineral oil three times a day besides a cathartic at night, and an enema in the morning.  No wonder she was a little dubious over such mild treatment as mine seemed to be!

Constipation was only one of this young woman’s troubles.  She could not sleep and was so fatigued that she believed herself at the end of her physical capital.  When she first came to me she had tears in her eyes most of the time and used to confide to various people that she was sure she was a patient that I could not cure,—­a very common belief among nervous invalids!  She was sure that I did not understand her case, and that she could not get anything out of this kind of treatment.

It was only a very short time, however, before her bowels were functioning like those of a normal person.  She lost her insomnia and her fatigue and went away as well as ever.  When she got back to her office, she found that her old position, which she had believed secure to her, had been given to another.  She had to go out and hunt a new job and face conditions harder than she had had before, but she came through with flying colors.  A short time ago Miss H. came back to see me,—­a happy, robust young woman, very different from the person I had first known.  She assured me that she had never had any return of her old symptoms and that she was as well as a person could be.

=Living up to a Suggestion.= Mrs. T. had not had a natural movement of the bowels in twenty-five years.  After the birth of a child, twenty-five years before, her physician had told her that her muscles had been so badly torn in labor that they could not carry through a natural movement.  After that she had never gone a day without a pill or an enema.  I explained to her that when any muscle of the rectum is injured in childbirth, it is the sphincter-ani, and that since this is the muscle whose contraction holds back the bowel content, its injury would tend to over-free evacuation rather than to constipation.  She saw the point and within two or three days regained her old power of spontaneous evacuation.