Colonic irrigation is a treatment by enema, practised by naturopaths and designed to clean out the large bowel, which, it is maintained, becomes encrusted with foreign and potentially poisonous material. The enema usually consists of warm water, but sometimes other substances are added to it.
The practice is derived from one of man's oldest treatments — clysters — which was especially popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These were enemas, which were adjuncts to purging. Along with bleeding, emptying the bowels was one of the few active and productive treatments available to physicians in the pre-scientific age. Molière satirized the practice brilliantly in Le Malade Imaginaire, describing ‘a little insinuative, preparative and emollient clyster to mollify, moisten and refresh his worship's bowels’ and ‘a good detersive clyster … to scour, wash and cleanse his honour's abdomen’.
The popularity of enemas or colonic irrigation did not decline with the development of ‘scientific’ medicine. On the contrary, they were an obvious form of treatment for ‘constipation’, a subject with which many Victorians were obsessed. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the theory of autointoxication reigned. It was suggested that the bowels should move three times a day but that civilization, unhealthy living, and unhealthy diet had reduced the frequency, allowing foreign matter, poisons, and substances producing ‘toxins’ to accumulate in the bowel, causing ill-health and many diseases. This theory was widely promulgated by prominent people, including the Nobel-prize-winning chemist, Élie Metchnikoff, the distinguished London surgeon, Arbuthnot Lane, and, in America, John Harvey Kellogg, founder of the Kellogg food empire.
As the twentieth century progressed, orthodox medicine paid less attention to constipation. The idea of ‘toxins’ and self -poisoning gradually lost its appeal after it was shown that the symptoms of constipation could be produced by cotton wool and were relieved instantly by evacuation. However, many people remained obsessed with the contents of their bowels and continued to believe firmly in their poisonous nature. Some practitioners of alternative medicine have made this the chief feature of the treatment they offer. For many years the London newspaper, The Times, carried an advertisement for colonic irrigation on its front page. Even in the 1990s advertisements in the popular press suggested ‘A well-balanced diet may not be enough’ and announced that a ‘colon cleanse’ was ‘the natural vegetarian food supplement to form a friendlier, health technology’. A colonic therapist announced that she had treated several thousand people and had ‘only ever seen one healthy colon’. We were told ‘many of us are carrying around between five and twenty pounds of mucus and undischarged debris in our colons’. Mucus in fact is a normal and essential lubricant, produced continually by cells in the lining of the whole of the gut; it is particularly necessary in the colon, where the contents are becoming progressively more solid: the bowel might well become ‘encrusted’ without it. Excess mucus occurs only in some pathological conditions, and makes its presence known in the stools.
In the last quarter of the twentieth century the fashion for colonic irrigation grew, especially among the rich and idle. As one newspaper put it, ‘Where else is there to go anyway, after the facial, the massage, the hairdo and the shops but to a “divine woman I know” who will clean you up and make you feel good on the inside as well?’
The fashion was greatly boosted by royal patronage. When Princess Diana and the Duchess of York took up colonic irrigation, the newspapers became excited. One journalist wrote that it was one of her reader's ‘favourite fantasies along with lesbian mud-wrestling. The typical colonic irrigation scheme involved a Stern Matron character clad in five-inch stiletto boots and face-mask. I find it quite difficult to picture our future Queen in this situation.’ One reporter went to try it and found it delightful: ‘For the next half hour you bask in the most satisfying loo-going experience of your life.’ She quoted one colonic hydrotherapist from the Well Centre, Chelsea; ‘We clean everything else. Why not our insides? It is our encrusted intestines which make us feel lazy and bloated’.
— Ann Dally
See also purging; toilet practices.
