Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why by Martha Meir Allen (black books to read .TXT) 📖
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In the Medical Pioneer of November, 1895, Prof. E. MacDowel Cosgrave, Professor of Biology, Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, says:—
“The result of all recent investigation is to show that the use of alcohol when a stimulant effect is desired, is an error; and that, from first to last alcohol acts as a narcotic.”
Dr. Edmunds, of London, said in an address given in Manchester:—
“By giving alcohol as a stimulant in exhausting diseases, I believe we always do as we should in giving a dose of opium and brandy and water to comfort a half suffocated patient; i. e., increase his danger. If that be so, we reduce alcohol not only from the position of food medicine, but we reduce it from the position of a goad; and we say that the supposititious stimulating or goading influence of alcohol is a mere delusion; that in fact alcohol always lessens the power of the patients, and always damages their chance of recovery, when it is a question of their getting through exhausting diseases.”
Many more such quotations might be adduced. Enough are given to show that the popular use of alcohol, when a stimulant is required, is considered a grave error by those who have most thoroughly studied the effects of this drug.
ALCOHOL AS A TONIC.Dr. J. J. Ridge, of London, says:—
“The action of alcohol in relaxing unstriped muscular fibre, which entitles it to be called an anti-spasmodic, robs it of all claim to give tone. The sense of exhilaration which follows small doses of alcohol has been mistaken for real strength and increase of vitality. It is well known that relaxation of the blood-vessels throughout the body is one of the first effects of alcohol. The arteries of the retina have been observed to dilate after very small doses of alcohol. The diminution of tone is well seen in the tracings of the pulse under the influence of alcohol. If one needs a tonic, therefore, alcohol is one of the things to be shunned altogether.
“But alcoholic beverages contain other things beside alcohol. Beer contains infusion of hops, or other bitter stomachics. Some wines contain tannin. These ingredients, by creating or stimulating the appetite, increase the strength and vital power in certain cases. But we have a large number of drugs which will do the same without the disadvantages arising from the presence of alcohol, and, if the flavor be objected to, many of them can be taken in the form of coated pills.
“The external use of cold, either by a dripping sheet, cold sponging, or a shower-bath, according to the power of reaction, is a valuable means of giving real tone.
“Wine is frequently prescribed for those young persons who are growing rapidly, and whose strength does not seem to keep pace with their growth. It is important to know that alcohol is not desirable in such circumstances. There is often found in such cases a defective appetite, perhaps even sub-acute gastric catarrh, which may be due to imperfect mastication through bad teeth, or aggravated by it. There are other causes, such as late hours, bad habits, improper food or irregular meals. In such cases those means must be resorted to which are so effectual in improving the condition and strengthening the heart of athletes. Regular and regulated meals, exercise in the fresh air, a good amount of rest and sleep—these will do more than anything else to invigorate the bodily health.”
Dr. N. S. Davis says:—
“Although I was taught, like all others, to use alcohol as a tonic when patients were sick, to hasten their recovery and promote their strength, yet it did not take me very long to find out that here and there was one already a teetotaler who would not take wine long, nor any kind of alcoholic drink unless prescribed, just as castor-oil, dose by dose, but who, when he got beyond the necessity of having it as a medicine, took no more. What was the comparison? My patients who refused, or did not take alcohol, got strong quicker and had less tendency to relapse than those who continued its use. Here was the first step in progress, and consequently I came soon to cease the recommending it merely to hasten recovery of strength. As a tonic, I found it of no value.”
Dr. James Miller, of Edinburgh, says in Alcohol, Its Place and Power, written many years ago:—
“It may be well here to correct an important error, yet very current, in regard to the medicinal use of alcohol. People regard it as a simple and common tonic; and are ready to accept its supposed help as such in every form of weakness and general disorder of health. But it is ordinarily, no true tonic.”
Dr. Ernest Hart, editor of the British Medical Journal, stated some years ago at a meeting of the British Medical Temperance Association that “the medical profession were nearly all agreed that alcohol is neither a food nor a tonic.”
Many drunkards have been made, especially among women, by the delusion that alcohol has tonic effect. As a sample of these sad cases the following is given, taken from a recent number of The National Advocate:—
“There is in the jail at Elizabeth, N. J., a woman who was arrested while participating in wild drunken orgies with a gang of tramps in the woods near the town. She appears nothing but a besotted hag, but was only a short time ago a dutiful wife of a respectable man, and the mother of three beautiful children. Her father, who is said to be living in a village in New York State, is a highly respected minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Her children are in an asylum, and her husband is a wanderer in the West. The cause of her ruin was beer, prescribed for her by the family physician as a tonic. At first she refused to take it, having always been a teetotaler, but persuaded to obey the physician, she soon acquired a taste for the drink that speedily developed into the overmastering appetite, which has brought her and hers to this sad condition.”
ALCOHOL AS A SEDATIVE.Dr. J. J. Ridge says in the Medical Pioneer, April, 1893:—
“Alcohol, chiefly in the form of spirits, is often given to procure sleep and to relieve pain, such as that of neuralgia, dyspepsia, colic and diarrhœa. It is as a sedative that alcohol is so insidious and seductive in cases of chronic disease, as, if frequently resorted to, the drink craving is almost certainly developed. Hence the importance in many cases of rather bearing the ills we have than of flying to others that we know not of. It is clear that other narcotics, such as opium, morphia, chorodyne, chloral, are open to the same objection, and the victims of these drugs are terribly numerous. * * * * * In many instances some form of dyspepsia is the cause of the sleeplessness, palpitation or other uneasy feeling for which a sedative is desired, and when this is cured the symptoms vanish.”
A prominent minister in a large American city was afflicted with insomnia a few years ago, and, after trying various remedies, was advised by a physician to try whisky “night-caps.” He became a hopeless drunkard. A young medical student in New York appealed to one of his professors for aid in overcoming aggravated insomnia. The professor advised whisky and morphine! The advice led to the ruin of the young man.
ALCOHOL AS AN ANTIPYRETIC.“By the power of alcohol to retard the evolution of heat in retarding molecular changes in the tissues, the liquids containing it may be used as antipyretics when the temperature is too high, and to retard the processes of waste when these are too rapid. But the antipyretic influence of alcohol is so feeble in comparison with the proper application of water to the surface, or with the internal administration of sulphate of quinia, salicylic acid, digitalis, etc. that no one thinks of using it for antipyretic purposes.”—Dr. N. S. Davis in Principles and Practice of Medicine.
PROFESSOR ATWATER’S CONCLUSIONS UPON ALCOHOL AS A FUEL-FOOD.In 1899 a decided sensation was caused by the announcement that Prof. Atwater, of Middletown, Conn., had proved that alcohol is a fuel-food equal in value to carbohydrates and fats. The study later of Prof. Atwater’s report of his investigations led to prolonged discussions among medical men interested in the alcohol question, and his theory that alcohol is a food because it is oxidized in the body was vigorously opposed by many scientists of high standing. Professor Abel, of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, an investigator of alcohol who worked with the Committee of Fifty, said on this point:—
“Oxidizability cannot be made the measure of usefulness in regard to this substance.”
Professor Gruber, president of the Royal Institute of Hygiene, Munich, said:—
“Does alcohol truly deserve to be called a food substance? Obviously, only such substances can be called food material, or be employed for food, as, like albumen, fat, and sugar, exert non-poisonous influence in the amounts in which they reach the blood and must circulate in it in order to nourish * * * * Although alcohol contributes energy it diminishes working ability. We are not able to find that its energy is turned to account for nerve and muscle work. Very small amounts, whose food value is insignificant, show an injurious effect upon the nervous system.”
Sir Victor Horsley, the well-known London surgeon, said:—
“We know that alcohol lowers the temperature of the body. It can only do that by diminishing the activity of the vital processes. It also diminishes very greatly the power of the muscles, and it diminishes the intellectual power of the nervous system. To call an agent that causes such diminution of activity throughout the whole body a food is ridiculous.”
An editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association said:
“The fallacy of the reasoning which would place alcohol among the foods is very apparent when we put it in the form of a syllogism: All foods are oxidized in the body; alcohol is oxidized in the body; therefore alcohol is food. As logically we might say: ‘All birds are bilaterally symmetrical; the earthworm is bilaterally symmetrical; therefore the earthworm is a bird.’ Oxidation within the body is simply one of several important properties of food, as bilateral symmetry is one of several important characteristics of a bird.”
Schafer’s Physiology says:—
“It cannot be doubted that any small production of energy resulting from the oxidation of alcohol is more than counterbalanced by its deleterious influences as a drug upon the tissue elements, and especially upon those of the nervous system.”
The Bulletin of the A. M. T. A. for July, 1899, contained an article upon Prof. Atwater by Dr. J. H. Kellogg, from which the following is taken:—
“Starch, sugar and fats become foods or fuels only through their assimilation. Abundant physiological evidence attests that no substance can act as a food, or as a true source of energy, unless it has first entered into the composition of the body. It must be assimilated. The forces manifested by the body, the muscular forces, or nervous energy, are the result of the breaking down of organized structure into simpler forms. For example, in the case of nervous energy, material from which nerve energy is derived is stored up in the nerve cell, and can be seen with the microscope in the form of minute granules, which disappear as the cell energy is expended, leaving the cell blank and shriveled when in a state of extreme fatigue from overwork. The same is essentially true of the muscle cell. The source of muscular energy is glycogen, an organized substance which becomes a part of the muscle tissue in a well-nourished muscle in
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