Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/514

 muscles, deprived of blood, convulse tremulously, or pass into active convulsions, as in tetanus. Alcohol, on the other hand, through its influence on nervous functions, relaxes the vessels of the minute circulation, sets free the heart, reduces the muscular power, and in every particular counteracts the tobacco. When a person receives a stun, or is shocked by some intelligence, or sight, or sound, that thereby stuns him, so that, like Hamlet, he is bechilled

he is for the moment in the same state as the man who first tries to smoke tobacco, and who, with pallid face, cold surface, and reeling brain, is to his sense and feeling stricken with all but mortal suffering and prostration. In each of these cases alcohol, for a moment, acts as an antidote not necessarily as the best antidote, but as a fair one. When, therefore, we see a man smoking and drinking, quaffing off the cup of wine or spirit to quiet the qualm which would otherwise be inflicted by the fumes of the cigar or the pipe, we really observe the facts of a most excellently though innocently devised physiological experiment on a living animal. The man, unconsciously to his knowledge, if not to his sensation—unless he be a physiologist—is inducing a balance in the tension of his arterial circuit.

In process of time the nervous system, becoming accustomed to these influences, one or both, in a certain degree tolerates them, for a period. The tolerance while it lasts is an advantage to the habit, and, if the habit were a necessity, it would be a blessing. But the advantage is not permanent. In the end the nutrition of the organic parts which are under the influence of the same nervous regulation is sure to suffer, and in many organizations to suffer rapidly and fatally.

It is probable, if not as yet provable, that all the agents named above produce their specific effect by the influence they exert over the automatic, self-regulating nervous function. In my researches on the action of some substances on the minute circulation, I have been able to differentiate their action by this general rule. The alcohols, the lighter alcohols, including common alcohol, relax the vessels; nicotine constringes; chloroform, by virtue of the chlorine in its composition, constringes; opium relaxes, then constringes; ether relaxes; absinthe, after a time, constringes; chloral hydrate first constringes, and afterward relaxes. From these differences of action the differences of phenomena in the persons affected are explainable. In like manner the ultimate deleterious effects of these agents on the nutrition of the body are explainable. It is a necessary result, for example, that under the long-continued use of alcohol the constantly relaxed and congested vessels should assume a new character and local function; that the parts depending on them for their supplies of blood should be changed from the natural structure to unnatural but definable, and now