Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/116

106 life greatly beyond the period at which it would cease if no nourishment is given; that, during the progress of acute diseases, it very commonly supports not only life, but also the bulk of the body, during many days of abstinence from common foods; and that, although the physician and physiologist fail to explain chemically how it is that the result is brought about, it may, nevertheless, be safely affirmed that the influence exerted over the body by alcohol is, essentially, of a food-character.

"It may be well," observes a writer in the Edinburgh Review "for even advanced and accomplished physiologists to bear in mind that there may be 'more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy.' There would at least be nothing more startling in the discovery that the physiological dogma which affirms that the products of the reduction of complex organic substances (such as alcohol) cannot be employed as the food of animal life had to be reconsidered, and in some particulars reversed, or revised, than there has been in the recent reversal of the Liebig dogma, that nitrogenous principles alone can be used for constructive purposes, and the simpler hydrocarbons alone for the production of animal warmth."

And, in this point of view, Dr. Anstie argues that many substances which are ranked as even "poisonous" to the system must not be taken to be absolutely "foreign" to the organism, except in a relative sense, when even such agents as mercury and arsenic, given in small doses for long periods, produce what is termed a tonic influence, improving the quality of the blood and the tissues, and do this in such a way that it is scarcely possible to maintain that they contract no organic combination.

Dr. Anstie frequently dwells on the notable fact that in all cases of disease where alcohol is used successfully as a medicinal support—as in the case of exhaustive fevers—its presence as an alcoholic emanation, whether in the breath or in other secretions, is absent altogether, as if, in those cases, the whole force of the agent was absorbed in its beneficent operation. He also declares that in such instances its exciting and intoxicating powers appear to be in abeyance, and that the recovery from acute disease where this medicine has been successfully employed is invariably more rapid and complete than it is in altogether similar cases which have been treated without alcohol.

If alcohol be only a heat-producing food, it may be remarked that nowadays Liebig's well-known theory is no longer absolute, since it is established that great labor may be performed for a short period without the use of a nitrogenous—diet that is, with one exclusively carbonaceous. Hence, perhaps, the claim of alcohol to constitute a food. Although forming none of the constituents of blood, alcohol limits the combination of those constituents, and in this way it is equivalent to so much blood. As Moleschott says: "He who has little can give but little, if he wish to retain as much as one who is