The Antique Trunk

At the outset I should mention that I have congenital bowel and urethral problems. Multiple high volume colon irrigations and bladder catheters are not an infrequent visitor to my person over the last six plus decades.

In 1978 I was living in Rhode Island. I went to an estate auction on Cape Cod to bid on several 1920’s era automobiles. While waiting for the automobiles to be on the block I purchased a number of interesting articles. One was an antique steamer trunk that was quite heavy with something. It had multiple locks that were frozen with rust secured to large iron straps around it; the corners of the trunk were also iron but covered with badly deteriorating leather. I bought the item for $20 or $25 dollars. Over the years, I moved several times and always moved the trunk although it was never opened.

When I ‘retired’ in 2002 I was cleaning out a large storage building I own and came across the trunk. A friend of mine is a locksmith and I ask if he could get it open. It took several weeks but he managed to free and open all five of the locks that was on it.

The contents of the antique trunk were equipment manuals, procedure for use of the equipment and a number of supply catalogs for rectal examination and irrigation equipment commonly used by Doctor’s offices around 1900. There were over thirty very thick bound ledger books of hand written notes on patients from about 1895 until 1916 by an office and clinic of Doctors in Boston that was located about a block off Beacon Street. Their offices main focus was proctocology and the treatment of constipation. They also had a large clientele of women who were treated for ‘the vapors’ and ‘hysteria’ on a regular basis. These ‘conditions’ were normally treated by inducing multiple orgasms on the ‘patient’.

The following story is fantasy and speculation, all names have been changed; but the equipment, their suggested use in the manuals; the methods, procedures and events, actually happened to someone about one hundred years ago according to the handwritten notes in the ledgers entered by the Doctors and Nurses at the time.