Medical Fads and Fancies 37 
thing of digestive disturbances—indigestion, if you will. 
People said that they suffered from gas and biliousness 
and noted that they got relief when they stopped eating 
or took purgatives. We learned from experience that 
many of these indigestions were curiously secondary to 
disease of certain organs, such as gall-bladder or ap- 
pendix. At least they were relieved permanently by suc- 
cessful operations on these organs. In other cases they 
were relieved permanently by an improvement in consti- 
pation. We said that these dyspepsias were reflex. We 
had been in the dark for centuries, we only had the 
physic of the ancients, until the marvelous revelations 
of the X-ray which begin to indicate a totally different 
cause. 
Let us visualize the stomach and intestines as a con- 
tinuous tube through which food passes in orderly fash- 
ion; slowly pausing in certain locations as in the stom- 
ach and cecum, and passing on more rapidly in others, 
as in the small intestine. In other words, stomach and 
intestines move their content on a schedule just as a 
railroad train operates, slowly and with delays in yards 
and terminals, and rapidly over long stretches of track 
between cities. Now if there be delay at any one point 
in this traffic, the movement behind it will be slowed and 
congested. Exactly the same thing takes place in our 
alimentary tract. If the appendix is bad and has re- 
sulted in surrounding inflammation with crippling of the 
cecum from which the appendix arises, the intestinal 
contents do not pass by this point as rapidly as normal, 
but delay there and congest behind it. Not only imme- 
diately behind it, but the recoil (as we call it) is felt far 
distant in front, even as far back as the stomach. It is 
also probable that this is in part due to the local dis 
turbance of the rhythmic alimentary contractural gra- 
