Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/235

 Rh or degrees of alcoholic narcotism, from the first to the last. Let me add two or three observations.

In the first place, we gather that this agent is a narcotic. I have compared it throughout to chloroform, and the comparison is good in all respects save one, viz., that alcohol is less fatal than chloroform as an immediate destroyer.

The well-proven fact that alcohol, when it is taken into the body, reduces the animal temperature, is full of the most important suggestions. It shows that alcohol does not in any sense act as a supplier of vital heat, as is so commonly supposed, and that it does not prevent the loss of heat, as those imagine "who take just a drop to keep out the cold." It shows, on the contrary, that cold and alcohol in their effects on the body run closely together, an opinion most fully confirmed by the experience of those who live or travel in cold regions of the earth.

The conclusive evidence now in our possession that alcohol taken into the animal body sets free the heart, so as to cause the excess of motion of which the record has been given above, is proof that the heart, under the frequent influence of alcohol, must undergo deleterious change of structure. It may, indeed, be admitted in proper fairness, that when the heart is passing through this rapid movement it is working under less pressure than when its movements are slow and natural; and this allowance must needs be made, or the inference would be that the organ ought to stop at once in function by the excess of strain put upon it.

I cannot, by any argument yet presented to me, admit the alcohols by any sign that should distinguish them from other chemical substances of the exciting and depressing narcotic class. When it is physiologically understood that what is called stimulation or excitement is, in absolute fact, a relaxation, I had nearly said a paralysis, of one of the most important mechanisms in the animal body—the minute, resisting, compensating circulation—we grasp quickly the error, in respect to the action of stimulants, in which we have been educated, and obtain a clear solution of the well-known experience that all excitement, all passion, leaves, after its departure, lowness of heart, depression of mind, sadness of spirit. In the scientific education of the people no fact is more deserving of special comment than this fact, that excitement is wasted force, the running down of the animal mechanism before it has served out its time of motion.

It will be said that alcohol cheers the weary, and that to take a little wine for the stomach's sake is one of those lessons that come from the deep recesses of human nature. I am not so obstinate as to deny this argument. There are times in the life of man when the heart is oppressed, when the resistance to its motion is excessive, and when blood flows languidly to the centres of life, nervous and muscular. 15