Colon
Colon names 3 different subjects across the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf. Each is set out below.
Colon or ASPINWALL (the former the official name)
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
or ASPINWALL (the former the official name), a free port of Panama, on Manzanillo Island, on the N. side of the Isthmus of Panama, at the Atlantic extremity of the interoceanic railway, and near that of the Panama canal. It had an important transit trade before the canal was begun, and since then_the place has been entirely transformed, a new town with wide and regular streets having been built on a tract of land reclaimed by the canal company. There is extensive harbor accommodation. The completion of the Panama canal made Colon an important commercial port. The United States Government has introduced modern systems of sanitation and sewers, which have made the city, formerly very unhealthful, one of the healthiest places in the tropics. Pop. about 20,000. See PANAMA.
Colon the greatest and widest of all the intestines
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
the greatest and widest of all the intestines, about 8 or 9 hands' breadth long. It begins where the ilium ends, in the cavity of the os ilium on the right side; from thence ascending by the kidney on the same side, it passes under the concave side of the liver, to which it is sometimes tied, as likewise to the gallbladder, which tinges it yellow in that place; then it runs under the bottom of the stomach to the spleen in the left side, to which it is also knit; from thence it turns down to the left kidney; and thence passing, in form of an S, it terminates at the upper part of the os sacrum in the rectum. The Colon-bacillus is the microbe of Asiatic cholera.
Colon ko-lon'. See Panama
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
ko-lon'. See Panama
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's 1921 note that "the Colon-bacillus is the microbe of Asiatic cholera" was already mistaken when it was printed: cholera is caused by Vibrio cholerae, identified by Robert Koch in 1883, while the colon bacillus described by Theodor Escherich in 1885 is the organism we now call Escherichia coli, a normal gut inhabitant. The anatomical description itself still holds, but the colon is now examined from the inside by fibre-optic colonoscopy, in use since about 1970 and the basis of mass screening for colorectal cancer, and its resident bacteria are studied as the gut microbiome. As for the Panamanian port, the official name Aspinwall has vanished entirely and the place is known only as Colon; it gained a duty-free trading zone in 1948 that became one of the largest in the world, though the claim that American sanitation made it "one of the healthiest places in the tropics" reads oddly beside the city's later reputation for decayed housing and poverty.
Written for this edition, 2026.