Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/256

252 been determined that any real progress will be made in solving the social problem of alcohol.

How, then, shall the cause of the desire for alcohol be determined? It would seem a priori improbable that anything so profoundly and universally desired should not answer to some real need of the human organism. It is clear, therefore, that the first thing to do is to make a scientific study of alcohol and its relation to the body and mind. It is only in recent years that any real attempt has been made to carry out such studies, but they have already cast a flood of light upon the subject. Physiological, psychological and sociological laboratories, hospitals and asylums, medical records and the reports of life insurance companies have all contributed to give us a more accurate knowledge of the action of alcohol on the human body and the human mind and to pave the way for a scientific theory of the alcohol motive. These researches are particularly instructive for the reason that they deal with the real question, i. e., with the effects of alcohol in moderate doses, not with its excessive use. The literature on inebriety, alcoholism and intemperance has always been sufficiently abundant.

It would be impossible in an article of this length to attempt even the briefest summary of these researches. It will be sufficient simply to recall the more important conclusions.

1. The desire for alcoholic drinks is due to the presence of ethyl alcohol,. Beer, ale, wine, and even whiskey and brandy, have characteristic odors, pleasant to many people and ravishing to some, but it is not on this account that they are desired. The pleasantness of the tastes and odor are largely if not wholly due to association with ethyl alcohol.

2. It is not on account of its food value that alcohol is desired. The researches of Atwater and others have seemed to show rather conclusively that a certain amount of alcohol, say two and one half ounces per day, may under favorable circumstances be oxidized in the body and so act as a substitute for other food by furnishing heat and possibly energy. It is not claimed, however, by those who hold that alcohol may in some cases act as a food that it is on this account that it is desired. The history of drinking, which shows that it has been wholly convivial among primitive people and that it is still largely so, precludes this view. It is only in modern industrial drinking that any attempt has been made to work on alcohol or to live on it, and here the attempt has not been successful, as Sullivan has shown in his careful and painstaking work on "A``lcoholism."

3. It has now been pretty definitely shown that alcohol is not a stimulant, and thus there is overthrown at once the most commonly accepted theory as to the cause of the desire for it. Alcohol acts as a depressant upon all forms of life from the simplest micro-organism to the most complex nervous structures in the human brain. It is