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"In the first stage the external temperature of the body is raised. In birds-pigeons-the rise may amount to a full degree on Fahrenheit's scale; in mammals it rarely exceeds half a degree, and in the confirmed inebriate, in whom the cutaneous vessels, are readily engorged, I have seen it run up to a degree and a half. In this case the effect on the extremities. of the nerves is that of a warm glow, like what is experienced during the reaction from cold.

"The heat felt in this stage might be considered as due to the combustion of the alcohol; it is not so; it is in truth a process of cooling. It is from the unfolding of the larger sheet of the warm blood and from the quicker radiation of heat from that larger surface. During this stage, which is comparatively brief, the internal temperature is declining, the expired air from the lungs is indicating, not an increase, but the first period of reduction in the amount of carbonic acid, and the reddened surface of the body is so reduced in tonicity that cold applied to it increases the suffusion. It is this most deceptive stage that led the older observers into the error that alcohol warms the body.

"In the second stage, the temperature first comes down to its natural standard and then declines to what is below natural. The fall is not considerable. In birds it reaches from one and a half to two degrees. In other animals, dogs and guinea pigs, it rarely exceeds one degree; in man it is confined to three fourths of a degree. In a room heated to 65° or 70° the decrease of animal temperature may not actually be perceived; but it is quickly detected if the person in whom it is present pass into a colder atmosphere; and it lasts, even when the further supply of alcohol is cut off, for a long period-viz., from two and a half to three hours. It is much prolonged by absence of food.

"During the third degree the fall of temperature rapidly increases, and as the fourth stage is approached it reaches a decline that becomes actually dangerous. In birds the reduction may be five degrees and a half, and in other animals three. In man it is often from two and a half to three degrees. There is always during this stage a profound sleep or coma, and while this lasts the temperature continues reduced.

"It is here worthy of incidental notice that, as a rule, the

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sleep of apoplexy and the sleep of drunkenness may be distinguished by a marked difference in the animal temperature. In apoplexy the temperature of the body is above, in drunkenness below, the natural standard of 98° of Fahrenheit's scale. "Under favorable circumstances a long period is required before the body recovers its natural warmth after such a reduction of heat as follows the extreme stage of alcoholic intoxication. With the first conscious movements of recovery there is a faint rise, but such is the depression that these very movements exhaust and lead to a further reduction. I have known as long a period as three days required in a man to bring back a steady, natural return of the full animal warmth.

"Through every stage, then, of the action of alcohol-barring the first stage of excitement, I found a reduction of animal heat to be the special action of the poison. To make the research more perfectly reliable, I combined the action of alcohol with that of cold. A warm-blooded animal, insensibly asleep in the third stage of alcoholic narcotism was placed in a chamber, the air of which was reduced in temperature to ten degrees below freezing point, together with another similar animal which had received no alcohol. I found that both sleep under these circumstances, but the alcoholic sleeps to die; the other sleeps more deeply than is natural, and lives so long as the store of food it is charged with continues to support life. Within this bound it awakes, in a warmer air, uninjured though the degree of cold be carried even lower and be continued for a much longer time.

"One more portion of evidence completes the research on the influence of alcohol on the animal temperature. As there is a decrease of temperature from alcohol, so there is proportionately a decrease in the amount of the natural products of the combustion of the body. The quantity of carbonic acid exhaled by the breath is proportionately diminished with the decline of the animal heat. In the extreme stage of alcoholic insensibility-short of the actually dangerous-the amount of carbonic acid exhaled by the animal and given off into the chamber I constructed for the purpose of observation was reduced to one third below the natural standard. On the human subject in this stage of insensibility the quantity of carbonic acid exhaled has not been measured, but in the earlier

stage of alcoholic derangement of function the exhaled gas was measured with much care by a very earnest worker, whose recent death we have also to deplore-Dr. Edward Smith. In these early stages Dr. Smith found that the amount of carbonic acid was reduced in man, as I have found it in the lower animals, so that the fact of the general reduction may be considered as established beyond disputation. We are landed then at last on this basis of knowledge. An agent that will burn and give forth heat and product of combustion outside the body, and which is obviously decomposed within the body, reduces the animal temperature, and prevents the yield of so much product of combustion as is actually natural to the organic life.

"What is the inference? The inference is that the alcohol is not burned after the manner of a food which supports animal combustion, but that it is decomposed into secondary products, by oxidation, at the expense of the oxygen which ought to be applied for the natural heating of the body.

"For some time to come the physiological world will be studiously intent on the discovery of the mode by which alcohol is removed from the organism. It is a subject on which I one day shall be able to speak, I hope, with some degree of experimental certainty, but on which at this moment I am not prepared to offer more than an indication of the probable course of research. I may venture to add in advance two or three suggestions to which my researches, so far as they go, point.

"Firstly, I believe there is a certain determinable degree of saturation of the blood with alcohol, within which degree all the alcohol is disposed of by its decomposition. Beyond that degree the oxidation is arrested, and then there is an accumulation of alcohol, with voidance of it, in the unchanged state in the secretions.

"Secondly, the change or decomposition of the alcohol in its course through the minute circulation, in which it is transformed, is not into carbonic acid and water, as though it were burned, but into a new soluble, chemical substance, probably aldehyde, which returns by the veins into the great channels of the circulation.

"Thirdly, I think I have made out that there is an outlet for the alcohol, or for the fluid product of its decomposition, into

DR. RICHARDSON'S FINDINGS.

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the alimentary canal, through the secretion of the liver. Thrown into the canal, it is, I believe, subjected there to further oxidation, is in fact oxidized by a process of fermentation attended with the active development of gaseous substances. From this surface the oxidized product is in turn re-absorbed in great part and carried into the circulation, and is disposed of by combination with bases or by further oxidation.

"Here, however, I leave the theoretical point to revert to the practical, and the practical is this: that alcohol cannot by any ingenuity of excuse for it be classified amongst the foods of man. It neither supplies matter for construction nor heat. On the contrary, it injures construction and it reduces temperature."

It must follow that, if alcohol be not a food at all, there is no occasion for its consumption as a drink until harmless beverages are exhausted; and, if that consumption be attended with great evils, there can be no excuse to society for permitting the traffic in spirits as a beverage.

CHAPTER IV.

ALCOHOL AGAINST THE BODY.

Dr. Richardson's Investigations Continued-Experiments with a Frog— Alcohol as a Regular Stimulant a Delusion-How Light Drinkers are Affected-Effect on the Heart and other Organs-How Disease is Originated-When the Memory becomes a Victim of the Habit-Gradual Steps of Physical Degeneration through Use of Liquor.

TH

HERE are several other important questions arising upon which I will now cite the conclusions of Dr. Richardson, based largely upon his own labors and experiments, assisted by his profound and universal knowledge of all that had been done and ascertained by other investigators in the same field of inquiry.

In considering the importance of experiments upon animals it should be known that it is considered as demonstrated, that alcohol has the same effect upon the inferior warm-blooded animals as upon man, except, of course, that higher nature which belongs only to him. In his Cantor Lectures, p. 118, Dr. Richardson says:

"There is nothing in what we see relating to the action of alcohol in man that would lead us to suppose it capable of giving an increased muscular power, and it is certain that animals subjected even for short periods of time to its influence lose their power for work in a marked degree. Indeed, if we were to treat our domestic animals with this agent in the same manner that we treat ourselves, we should soon have none that were tamable, none that were workable, and none that were edible. I thought it, nevertheless, worth the inquiry whether at any stage of the alcoholic excitement living muscle could be induced to show an extra amount of power. I therefore submitted muscle to this test: I gently weighted the hinder limb of a frog until the power of contraction was just overcome, then by a measured electrical current I stimulated the muscle to extra contraction, and determined the increase of weight that could thus be lifted. This decided upon in the healthy animal, the trial was repeated some days later on the same animal after it had received alcohol in sufficient quantities to induce the various stages

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