Page:Alcohol, a Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine.djvu/284

276 On the sixteenth of December, 1897, Dr. Sims Woodhead, president of the British Medical Temperance Association, gave a masterly address in London upon "Recent Researches on the Action of Alcohol." The lecture was illustrated by lantern slides. From the report given in The Medical Temperance Review of Jan., 1898, the following is culled:—

"In a series of drawings of kidney you will notice first that there is a condition known as cloudy swelling; this is one of the first changes that can be observed. Notice the characteristic features of this cloudy swelling in the cells of all these specimens. The large swollen cells are granular, and very frequently there is a granular mass in the lumen of the tubule.

In some cases the cells are so much swollen that the lumen of the tubule is represented merely by a 'star-shaped' radiating chink. The nucleus is usually somewhat obscured, that this alcoholic cloudy swelling (similar to that met with as the result of the administration of certain poisons) is the first change observed in the parenchymatous cells of the organs of animals that have died of acute alcoholic poisoning. This condition, unless the cause is removed, goes on to a condition of fatty-degeneration, as shown in the next specimen in which we have, in addition to the granular appearance of the protoplasm of the cell, a deposition of masses of fat in and at the expense of this protoplasm.

"There is another series of changes to which I wish to draw your attention. In the tubules of the kidney we have, in addition to the granular appearance of the protoplasm of the cells, an increase in the number of leucocytes, and connective tissue cells between the tubules around the glomeruli and along the course of the blood-vessels. This condition of small cell infiltration, we know, is constantly associated with inflammatory