AS A DIAGNOSIS, a health buzzword, autointoxication peaked in the early 1900s. It was a natural offshoot of “miasma” theory. From the early to the late 1800s, before physicians figured out the role of microorganisms and insects in causing and spreading disease, much of the blame was placed on clouds of nonspecific toxic gases—or miasmas—emanating from open sewer flows, garbage dumps, even graves.
If one bought into the dangers of miasmas, it wasn’t much of a leap to buy into the dangers of one’s own internal sewage. Purveyors of laxatives and enema devices played up the connection, referring to the colon as “the human privy,” “an obstructed sewer,” “this cesspool of death and contagion.” Whorton’s book reproduces a magazine ad for the French laxative Jubol, showing tiny uniformed men on their hands and knees with scrub brushes and buckets inside a colon, like workers in the Paris sewers.*
It made no difference that neither the specific poisons nor the mechanisms by which they might be causing harm were known or named. In the realm of quackery, vague is better. “It met a need,” wrote Whorton, “that medicine has felt in every age, providing an explanation and diagnosis for all those exasperating patients who insist they are sick, but are unable to present the physician with any clear organic pathology to prove it.” Autointoxication was the gluten of the early 1900s.
Bogus diagnoses beget bogus cures. Around the turn of the last century, hosing the colon was big business, far bigger than it is today, and nowhere bigger than at 134 West Sixty-Fifth Street, home of Tyrrell’s Hygienic Institute, a three-story New York brownstone dedicated to the manufacture and flatulent hyping of the J.B.L. Cascade colonic irrigator. J.B.L. stood for “Joy Beauty Life,” suggesting that your $12.30 was purchasing something loftier than a nozzle-topped whoopee cushion.
“The Internal Bath is taken by sitting on the J.B.L. Cascade,” states Charles Tyrrell in the 1936 promotional pamphlet Why We Should Bathe Internally. Tyrrell’s prior business had been in rubber medical goods. Aside from the rectal nozzle protruding from its flank, the Cascade looked little different from one of Tyrrell’s old water bottles.
Between businesses, Tyrrell had dabbled in small-press publishing. The experience served him well. He printed up thousands of thinly disguised promotional booklets that he distributed to pharmacists to hand out to patients. The gospel of autointoxication and internal putrescence was laid on thick and spiked with testimonials: from customers, doctors,* clergy,? all wordily professing their satisfaction and gratitude. Gone was their insomnia, their fatigue, their melancholia. Here was the fix for acne, bad breath, for lack of appetite and “loss of vim and snap.” An internal bath would rid you of irritability, “outrageous cantankerousness,” “the inability to hold down a job of lumber grading for over six months without quitting or getting fired.” One set of before and after photos seemed to imply that a high colonic could transform an unkempt, drooping moustache into a vigorous, curlicued handlebar.
It seemed there was no medical condition so dire that an internal bath would not fix it. Mr. H. J. Wells of 342 Lincoln Avenue, Detroit, credited the Cascade with relieving his wife of “an accumulation of effete mucous tissue . . . in strips about half an inch wide and from four to six inches long.” Mrs. Cora Ewing of Long Beach, California, waved good-bye to “a sack of pus above the left ovary.” People thanked Tyrrell for curing their asthma, their rheumatism, their typhoid fever, and their jaundice. Paralysis even! Epilepsy! The medical claims were sufficiently far-fetched that Tyrrell felt a need to point out that the “disorders may be due to factors other than . . . autointoxication.”
The American Medical Association’s Bureau of Investigation received so many letters from outraged physicians that it drafted a form letter to send in response. “We plan to get around to this institution after a while,” it promised. The first such letter in the Tyrrell Hygienic Institute file at the AMA archives is dated 1894, and the last, 1931, suggesting that a little more vim and snap might have been applied.
One member rose on his own to the task. In 1922, physician and autointoxication doubter Arthur Donaldson artificially and incontrovertibly constipated three dogs by temporarily sewing shut their anus. After four days, all the while eating regular meals of meat, milk, and bread, the dogs showed no physical symptoms beyond a mild loss of appetite—nothing to suggest a poisoning from within. All three, impressively, “seemed to be in fair spirits.”