Page:Alcohol, a Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine.djvu/293

Rh by Dr. Woodhead by drawings and photographs, shown on the lantern screen. The photographs included cells containing anthrax, typhoid and tubercle bacilli, the spirilla of relapsing fever, specimens from cases of anthrax. Specimens were shown in which the cells were actually ingesting and digesting the specific micro-organisms. In a case of typhoid, showing large masses of typhoid bacilli in one of Peyer's patches, there were seen certain of the cells which contained the typhoid bacilli, some of them undergoing degenerative changes, and showing unequal standing.

Of the researches made by Dr. Abbott referred to in the foregoing lecture Dr. N. S. Davis says:—

"Thus we have another and direct positive demonstration of the fact that the presence of alcohol in living bodies not only impairs all the physiological processes, but also impairs their vital resistance to the effects of all other poisons. It was hardly necessary, however, to trouble the rabbits to obtain proof of this; for such evidence may be found in abundance by examining the vital statistics of every civilized country. The late Frank H. Hamilton, in his valuable work on military hygiene, gives an interesting account of an experiment executed, not on a few rabbits, but on whole regiments of human beings, who were being exposed to the inhibition, not of the streptococcus pyogenes, but to the infections of malarial and typho-malaria fever. And, as many were attacked with sickness, it was thought by some of those in authority that if the soldiers were given a specified ration of alcoholic liquor two or three times a day, it might enable them to resist the morbid influences to which they were exposed. The proposed ration was accordingly ordered, and Dr. Hamilton informs us that the