Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/204

192 movements are totally arrested, and death closes the scene. Effects on the human organism being, when properly interpreted, like effects in the inorganic world—exactly proportionate to cause—the at first sight apparently stimulating and consequently salutary action of alcohol on the heart, when taken in moderation, is as much due to the alcohol's paralyzing power as the destruction of all vital action is its result when it is taken in poisonous quantities. From this, however, it is not to be inferred that its incipient paralyzing power over the inhibitory cardiac nerve mechanism must necessarily be in all cases detrimental. On the contrary, it may actually in many instances be beneficial. Just in the same way as atropia, strophantus, digitalis, and daturine—which are all cardiac inhibitory nerve paralyzers—prove exceedingly useful medicinal agents when they are judiciously employed in appropriate cases. So alcohol, by the doctor's skill, may in like manner be so used as to paralyze to cure, and not to kill.

It being well known that intemperance is a most fruitful cause, not only of all the various forms of heart-disease, but likewise of the degenerations of the coats of the blood-vessels, all I at present require to do is to prove that even what is called moderate drinking has a much greater share than is generally supposed, in not only greatly increasing heart-diseases, in cases where they already exist, but also in inducing their development in the constitutionally and hereditarily predisposed to become affected by them. The reason why moderate drinking should induce not only hypertrophy and dilatation, but likewise valvular disease of the heart, is not far to seek—from its being a recognized fact that every increase in a muscle's activity is associated with an increase in its development, as well as its tension on the parts with which it is connected. The truth of the foregoing statements will, by a little reflection, be gleaned from the results of drinking small quantities of alcohol frequently during the day, as manifested by the figures in the subjoined table of mortality I have drawn up from the registrar-general's reports, of the relative frequency of diseases of the circulatory system among men between the ages of twenty-five and sixty-five employed in different industries. For it not only shows the effects of so-called moderate drinking per se, but likewise the still more pernicious effects of it when it is associated with intermittent muscular strain—that is to say, when the stimulus of alcohol upon the heart has superadded to it an increase in the heart's activity necessitated by oft-repeated sudden muscular