Page:Alcohol, a Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine.djvu/254

246 she says the beer makes her feel better after each drink, and that the gin helps to relieve the severe attacks of pain, and consequently she thinks she could not do without them. It is undoubtedly true that the patient feels temporary relief from the anæsthetic effect of the alcohol in her beer and gin, just as she would from any anæsthetic or narcotic. And it is equally true that so long as the alcohol is present in her blood it so modifies the hemoglobin and albuminous constituents, as to diminish the reception and internal distribution of oxygen, and thereby retards metabolic changes. But the combined influence of the alcohol in retarding the internal distribution of oxygen and the drain upon the nutritive elements of her blood, in furnishing milk for her baby, led to rapid impoverishment of the blood and tissues, and the early establishment of a sufficient grade of gastritis to cause indigestion, frequent vomiting, and, later, paroxysms of severe gastralgia, with general emaciation, and loss of strength.

"In accordance with the present popular ideas, both in and out of the profession, this patient tells me she has tried a great variety of foods, peptonized, sterilized, and predigested, but all to no purpose. And why?—Simply because her troubles are not in the kind of food she takes, but in the morbid condition of her blood, and of the mucous membrane and nerves of her stomach. Consequently the rational indications for treatment are: (a) to get her stomach and blood free from the alcohol of beer and gin; (b) to encourage the reception and internal distribution of oxygen by plenty of fresh air; (c) to give her the most bland, or unirritating food in small, and frequently repeated doses, of which good milk with lime-water, and milk and wheat-flour gruel are the best; (d) such medicines as possess sufficient antiseptic, and anodyne properties to allay the irritability of the gastric mucous membrane, and lessen fermentation."