Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why Part 10

The normal temperature of the human body is a little over 98 degrees by Fahrenheit's thermometer. If the temperature is found to be much above or below 98 degrees the person is considered out of health; indeed by this condition alone physicians are able to detect serious forms of disease. By the use of the clinical thermometer, placed under the tongue, it is easy to determine what agents acting upon the body will cause the temperature to vary from the natural standard. When alcohol is swallowed there is at first a decided feeling of warmth induced; if the temperature be taken now it will be found that in a person unaccustomed to alcohol the warmth may be raised half a degree; in one accustomed to alcohol the warmth may be raised a full degree, or even a degree and a half beyond the natural standard. But this warmth is only temporary, and is soon succeeded by chilliness.

Dr. Richardson says in his _Temperance Lesson Book_:--

"The sense of warmth occurs in the following way: When the alcohol enters the body, and by the blood-vessels is conveyed to all parts of the body, it reduces the nervous power of the small blood-vessels which are spread out through the whole of the surface of the skin. In their weakened state these vessels are unable duly to resist the course of blood which is coming into them from the heart under its stroke. The result is that an excess of warm blood fresh from the heart is thrown into these fine vessels, which causes the skin to become flushed and red as it is seen to be after wine or other strong drink has been swallowed and sent through the body. So, as there is now more warm blood in the skin than is natural to it, a sense of increased warmth is felt. The skin of the body is the most sensitive of substances and the sense of warmth through, or over the whole surface of the skin is conveyed from it to the brain and nervous centres of the body, by which we are enabled to feel.

"The warmth of surface which seems to be imparted by alcohol, only _seems_ to be imparted. Positively the warmth is not imparted by the alcohol, but is set free by it.

"In a short time the sense of warmth is succeeded by a feeling of slight chilliness. Unless the person is in a very warm room, or has recently partaken of food, the thermometer will now show a decided decrease in temperature, reaching often to a degree.

Should the person go out into a cold air, and especially should he go into a cold air while badly supplied with food, the fall of temperature may reach to two degrees below the natural standard of bodily heat. In this state he easily takes cold, and in frosty weather readily contracts congestion of the lungs, and that disease which is known as bronchitis. If the person drinks to drunkenness his temperature will be found to be from two and a half to three degrees below the natural standard. It takes from two to three days, under the most favorable circ.u.mstances, for the animal warmth to become steadily re-established after a drunken spree.

"The excitement of the mind in the early stages of drunkenness is not natural; it is exhaustive of the bodily powers, and exhaustive for no useful purpose whatever. * * * * *

"As nothing has been supplied by the alcohol to keep up the supply of heat the vital energy is rapidly exhausted, and if the person is exposed to cold, the exhaustion becomes extreme, sometimes fatal. All great consumers of alcohol are chillier during winter than are abstainers, and as they labor under the delusion that they must take wine or ale or spirits to keep them warm, they keep on making matters worse by constantly resorting to their enemy for relief."

Dr. Newell Martin makes this very clear in his physiology, _The Human Body_.

"Our feeling of being warm depends on the nerves of the skin. We have no nerves which tell us whether heart or muscles or brain, are warmer or cooler. These inside parts are always hotter than the skin, and if blood which has been made hot in them flows in large quant.i.ty to the skin, we feel warmer because the skin is heated. As alcoholic drinks make more blood flow through the skin, they often make a man feel warmer. But their actual effect upon the temperature of the whole body is to lower it. The more blood that flows through the skin, the more heat is given off from the body to the air, and the more blood, so cooled, is sent back to the internal organs. The consequence is that alcohol, in proportion to the amount taken, cools the body as a whole, though it may for a time heat the skin."

If other evidence that alcohol is not heat-producing in the body were necessary it could be found in the fact that the products of combustion are decreased when it is present in the body. The quant.i.ty of carbonic acid exhaled by the breath is proportionately diminished with the decline of animal heat.

Arctic explorers learned by experience what science discovered by experiment. Dr. Hayes, the explorer, says:--

"While fresh animal food, and especially fat, is absolutely essential to the inhabitants and travelers in Arctic countries, alcohol, in almost any shape, is not only completely useless, but positively injurious."

Lieutenant Johnson, who accompanied Nansen upon his northern expedition, said, when interviewed by a reporter of the London _Daily News_:--

"The common opinion that alcohol becomes in some way a necessity in cold countries is entirely a mistaken one. This has been conclusively proved by the expedition. In making up his list of the _Fram's_ equipments, Nansen did not include any spirits, with the exception of some spirits of wine for lamps and stoves."

In the list of stores taken upon the long sledging expedition after leaving the _Fram_ no liquors are mentioned. See _Farthest North_, by Nansen. The omission of spirits was not because of any "temperance fanaticism," but because the experience of former Arctic expeditions had shown clearly that men freeze more readily after partaking of alcohol than when they totally abstain from it.

That wine is not a fuel-food was shown conclusively in the Franco-Prussian war during the siege of Paris. Food was scarce in the French Army, and wine was liberally supplied. The men complained bitterly of the extreme chilliness which affected them. Dr. Klein, a French staff surgeon, was reported in the _Medical Temperance Journal_ of England, October 1873, as saying of this:--

"We found most decidedly that alcohol was no subst.i.tute for bread and meat. We also found that it was no subst.i.tute for coals. We of the army had to sleep outside Paris on the frozen ground. We had plenty of alcohol, but it did not make us warm.

Let me tell you there is nothing that will make you feel the cold more, nothing which will make you feel the dreadful sense of hunger more, than alcohol."

There is no evidence against alcohol stronger than that which shows it to be not heat-producing, as commonly believed, but a reducer of heat in the body. Indeed, this question of bodily temperature is used in recent times to decide whether a man who has fallen upon the street is troubled by apoplexy, or influenced by alcoholism. If the clinical thermometer shows the temperature to be above normal, it is apoplexy; if below normal, it is alcoholism.

"Alcohol is clearly proved to be not a fuel-food, for if it were it would enable the body to resist cold, instead of making it colder; and in the extreme degrees of cold it would go on burning like other fuel-foods, and would maintain, instead of helping to destroy, life."--Richardson's _Lesson Book_.

Yet because it creates a glow of warmth in the skin immediately after drinking it, thousands of people will discredit all evidence that it is a reducer of bodily heat. Clinical thermometers, and after-sensations of chilliness, are unheeded, for "Wine is a mocker," and mult.i.tudes are willing to be deceived by it.

So, also, with the conclusions against it as a strengthening agent; because it dulls the sense of hunger and of fatigue, those who crave it will declare in the face of all scientific testimony that it strengthens them, and takes the place of food. They will cite, too, the cases of people who "lived upon whisky" during an illness of greater or less duration. Of the sustaining of life upon alcohol only, Dr. N. S. Davis has said:--

"The falsity of all such stories is made apparent by the fact that nineteen-twentieths of all the alcoholic drinks given to the sick are given in connection with sugar, milk, eggs or meat-broths, which furnish the nutriment, and would support the patients better if given with the same perseverance without the alcohol than with it. While we have quite a number of examples of men living on nothing but water forty or fifty days, I have never seen or learned of a well-authenticated case of a man's taking or receiving into his system nothing but alcohol for half of that length of time, without becoming sick with either gastro-duodenitis, nephritis, or delirium tremens."

_Some of the defenders of the medicinal use of alcohol claim that since it has been shown to reduce tissue waste it should be cla.s.sed as an indirect food, a conserver of tissue._ Of this claim, Dr. N. S. Davis says in the _Bulletin of the A. M. T. A._, November, 1895:--

"A careful study of the conditions and processes necessary for both tissue building or nutrition, and tissue waste or disintegration, in all the higher order of animals, will show that neither process can be materially r.e.t.a.r.ded without r.e.t.a.r.ding or preventing the other. Both processes take place only in bioplasm or vitalized matter, supplied with oxygen, water and heat. Neither the a.s.similation of new material food, nor its use in tissue building can be effected without the presence of free oxygen and nuclein, or corpuscular elements of the blood. And without the presence of the same elements we can have no natural tissue disintegration and removal of the waste.

The processes of tissue building and tissue disintegration, are therefore, so intimately related, and dependent upon the same materials and forces, that neither can be hastened or r.e.t.a.r.ded from day to day without influencing the other. When alcohol or any other substance, introduced into the blood, r.e.t.a.r.ds the tissue waste, as shown by the diminished amount of excretory products, it must do so by either diminis.h.i.+ng the amount of free oxygen in the blood, by impairing the vasomotor and trophic nerve functions or by direct impairment of the properties of the nuclein or protogen elements of the blood and tissues. The popular idea, both in and out of the profession is, that the alcohol, by further oxidation in the blood, lessens the amount of oxygen to act on the tissues, and generates heat or 'some kind of force.' Those who advocate this theory of saving the tissues by combining the oxygen with alcohol seem to forget that in doing so they are diverting and using up the only agent, oxygen, capable of combining with, and promoting the elimination of, all natural waste products as well as the various toxic elements causing disease.

"But the theory that alcohol directly combines with the oxygen of the blood by which it would be converted into carbonic acid and water with evolution of heat is completely refuted by the well-known fact that its presence in the blood diminishes both temperature and elimination of carbonic acid as already stated.

Physiologists of the present day very generally agree that the capacity of the blood to receive oxygen from the lungs, and convey it to the systemic capillaries and various tissues, depends chiefly on its hemoglobin (red coloring matter), protein, or alb.u.minous and saline elements.

"Both experimental and clinical facts in abundance show that alcohol at all ordinary temperatures displays a much stronger affinity for these elements of the blood and tissues, than it does for oxygen. And when present in the blood, it rapidly attracts both water and hemoglobin from the corpuscular and alb.u.minoid elements of that fluid, and thereby diminishes its reception and distribution of oxygen. We are thus enabled to see clearly how the alcohol diminishes the oxygenation and decarbonization of the blood, and r.e.t.a.r.ds all tissue changes both of nutrition and waste without itself undergoing oxidation with evolution of heat. Consequently, instead of acting as a s.h.i.+eld or conservator of the tissues by simply combining with the oxygen, the alcohol directly impairs the properties and functions of the most highly vitalized elements of the blood itself, and thereby not only r.e.t.a.r.ds tissue waste but also equally r.e.t.a.r.ds the highest grades of nutrition, and favors only sclerotic, fatty and molecular degenerations, as we see everywhere resulting from its continued use. Can an agent displaying such properties and effects be called a _food_, either direct or indirect, without a total disregard for the proper meaning of words?"

In another place he says:--

"This lessening of the elimination of tissue waste is simply an evidence of the acc.u.mulation of poisonous substances within the body, through the lessened activity of liver and kidneys and the impairment of the blood."

Dr. Ezra M. Hunt says in _Alcohol as Food and as Medicine_, page 37:--

"It sounds conservative of health to say of a substance that it delays the breaking down of tissue, but the physiologist does not allow a substance which occasions such delay, to possess, because of that, either dietetic or remedial value. To increase weight by prolonged constipation is not a physiological process."

Dalton says:--

"The importance of tissue change to the maintenance of life is readily shown by the injurious effects which follow upon its disturbance. If the discharge of the excrement.i.tious substances be in any way impeded or suspended, these substances acc.u.mulate either in the blood or tissues, or both. In consequence of this retention and acc.u.mulation they become poisonous, and rapidly produce a derangement of the vital functions. Their influence is princ.i.p.ally exerted upon the nervous system, through which they produce most frequent irritability, disturbance of the special senses, delirium, insensibility, coma, and finally, death."

The power to r.e.t.a.r.d the pa.s.sage of waste matter from the system is one of the gravest objections to the use of alcohol in sickness, as the germs of disease are thereby caused to remain longer in the body than they would, were no alcohol or drug of similar action, used. Thus recovery is delayed, if not effectually hindered.

The preponderance of scientific evidence is all against alcohol as possessing food qualities. It contains no elements capable of entering into the composition of any part of the body, hence cannot give strength; it is not a fuel-food as it does not supply heat to the body, but decreases temperature; and its cla.s.sification as indirect food because it r.e.t.a.r.ds the pa.s.sage of waste matter is shown to be utterly unscientific, as any agent which interferes with the natural processes of a.s.similation and disintegration is a dangerous agent, a poison rather than a food.

The question naturally arises:--

If these drinks are not liquid food, as we have been taught to believe, how is it, since they are made from food, as barley, corn, grapes, potatoes, etc?

These drinks are not food, although made from food, because in the process of manufacturing them the food principle is destroyed. The grain is malted to change starch into sugar--loss of food principle begins here--then the malted grain is soaked in water to extract the saccharine matter. When the sugar is all in the water the grain goes to feed cattle or hogs, and the sweetened water is fermented. The fermentation changes the sugar into alcohol.

a.n.a.lyses of beer by eminent chemists show an average of 90 per cent.

water, 4 per cent. alcohol, and 6 per cent. malt extract. The malt extract consists of gum, sugar, various acids, salts and hop extract.

Starch and sugar are all of these capable of digestion, and the amount of them would be equal to 39 ounces to the barrel of beer. Liebig, the great German chemist, said:--

"If a man drinks daily 8 or 10 quarts of the best Bavarian beer, in a year he will have taken into his system the nutritive const.i.tuents contained in a 5 pound loaf of bread."

Eight quarts a day for a year would be 2,920 quarts, or a little more than 23 barrels. If sold to the consumer at the low rate of five cents a pint, it would cost him $292; a high price for as much nourishment as in a 5 pound loaf!

a.n.a.lyses of wine by reliable chemists show that the consumer must pay $500 for the equivalent in nourishment of a 5 pound loaf of bread, wine being higher priced than beer. Wines average 80 per cent. water, about 15 per cent. alcohol, and 5 per cent. residue. This residue is composed of sugar, tartaric, acetic and carbonic acids, salts of pota.s.sium and sodium, tannic acid, and traces of an ethereal substance which gives the peculiar or distinguis.h.i.+ng flavor. The only one of these ingredients possessing food value is sugar; this exists chiefly in what are called sweet wines. Yet how many thousands of people spend money they can ill afford for wines and beers to build up the failing strength of some loved one! A costly delusion, and too often a fatal one!

"Distilled liquors, if unadulterated, contain literally nothing but water and alcohol, except traces of juniper in gin, and the flavor of the fermented material from which they have been distilled."--_Influence of Alcohol_, by N. S. Davis, M. D.

It is the solemn duty of those to whom the people look for instruction in matters of health to undeceive the toiling ma.s.ses as to the food-value of alcoholic liquids. Some of the medical profession are faithful in this regard, but too many others are themselves deceived, or care not for the destruction of the people.

IS ALCOHOL A STIMULANT?

A lady asked her family physician several years ago what he thought of the views of those medical writers who cla.s.s alcohol as a narcotic, and not a stimulant. He answered with some heat, "Any one who says alcohol is not a stimulant is either a fool or a knave!" He could not have been aware that some of the most distinguished professors in American medical colleges teach that alcohol is not, properly speaking, a stimulant, but a narcotic.

The accepted definition of a stimulant in medical literature is some agent capable of exciting or increasing _vital activity_ as a whole, or the natural activity of some one structure or organ.

Dr. N. S. Davis has said repeatedly that both clinical and experimental observations show that alcohol directly diminishes the functional activity of all nerve structures, pre-eminently those of respiration and circulation, thus decreasing the internal distribution of oxygen, which is nature's own special exciter of all vital action.