Page:Alcohol, a Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine.djvu/127

Rh The following is taken from an editorial article in the American Medical Temperance Quarterly for January, 1894:—

"Drs. Sidney Ringer and H. Sainsbury in a carefully executed series of experiments on the isolated heart of the frog, found that all the alcohol when mixed with the blood circulating through the heart, uniformly diminished the action of that organ in direct proportion to the quantity of alcohol used, until complete paralysis was induced. In closing their report in regard to the action of different alcohols, they say that by their direct action on the cardiac tissue these drugs are clearly paralyzant, and that this appears to be the case from the outset, no stage of increased force of contraction preceding.'

"Professor Martin, while in connection with the Johns Hopkins University, performed an equally careful series of experiments in regard to the action of ethylic, or ordinary alcohol, directly on the cardiac structures of the dog, and with the same results. He makes the following explicit statement of the results obtained by him. 'Blood containing one-fourth per cent, by volume, that is two and a half parts per 1000 of absolute alcohol, almost invariably diminishes, within a minute, the work done by the heart; blood containing one-half per cent, always diminishes it, and may even bring the amount pumped out by the left ventricle to so small a quantity that it is not sufficient to supply the coronary arteries.'

"In 1883, R. Dubois, by direct experimenting upon animals, found that the presence of alcohol in the blood much intensified the action of chloroform and thereby rendered a much less dose fatal.

"Prof. H. C. Wood of the University of Pennsylvania, in an address upon Anæsthesia to the Tenth International Medical Congress, of Berlin, in 1890, said: 'In my own experiments with alcohol, an eighty per cent, fluid was used largely diluted with water. The amount injected into the jugular vein varied in the