Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why. Martha Meir Allen
in the African war some years before when, as they passed through a malarial district, and a dram was served, men fell out by dozens. Dr. Parkes, one of the medical officers, prevailed upon the commander-in-chief to not allow any more alcoholic drams while the troops were marching to Kumassi.
Experiments in lifting weights have also been tried upon men by careful investigators. In every case it was found that even beer, and very dilute solutions of alcohol, would diminish the height to which the lifted weight could be raised. As an illustration of the deceptive power of alcohol upon people under its influence, it is said that persons experimented upon were under the impression, after the drink, that they could do more work, and do it more easily, although the testing-machine showed exactly the contrary to be true.
Athletes and their trainers have learned by experience that alcohol does not give strength, but is, in reality, a destroyer of muscular power. No careful trainer will allow a candidate for athletic honors to drink even beer, not to speak of stronger liquors. When Sullivan, the once famous pugilist, was defeated by Corbett, he said in lamenting his lost championship, “It was the booze did it”; meaning that he had violated training rules, and used liquor. University teams and crews have proved substantially that drinking men are absolutely no good in sports, or upon the water. Football and baseball teams, anxious to excel, are beginning to have a cast-iron temperance pledge for their members. So practical experience of those competing in tests of strength and endurance teach eloquently that alcohol does not give strength, but rather weakens the body, by rendering the muscles flabby.
Sandow, the modern Samson, wrote his methods of training in one of the magazines a few years ago, and stated that he used no alcoholic beverages. The ancient Samson was not allowed to taste even wine from birth.
A question worthy of serious consideration is: how are the sick to be strengthened and “supported” by drinks which athletes are warned to specially shun as weakening to the body? Either the sick are mistakenly advised, or the athletes are in error. Which seems the more likely?
Dr. Richardson says in Lectures on Alcohol:—
“I would earnestly impress that the systematic administration of alcohol for the purpose of giving and sustaining strength is an entire delusion.”
In another place he says:—
“Never let this be forgotten in thinking of strong drink: that the drink is strong only to destroy; that it never by any possibility adds strength to those who drink it.”
Sir William Gull, late physician to the Prince of Wales, said before a Select Committee of the House of Lords on Intemperance:—
“There is a great feeling in society that strong wine and other strong drinks give strength. A large number of people have fallen into that error, and fall into it every day.”
Any unprejudiced person can readily see that experience and experiment unite in testifying that alcohol does not give strength, hence differs radically from most substances commonly classed as foods. Yet millions of dollars are spent annually by deluded people upon supposedly strength-giving drinks, and thousands of the sick are ignorantly, or carelessly, advised to take beer or wine to make them strong and to support them when solid food cannot be assimilated. Truly, “My people is destroyed for lack of knowledge.”
Foods give force to the body.
Dr. Richardson says:—
“We learn in respect to alcohol that the temporary excitement is produced at the expense of the animal matter and animal force, and that the ideas of the necessity of resorting to it as a food, to build up the body or to lift up the forces of the body, are ideas as solemnly false as they are widely disseminated.”
Dr. Benjamin Brodie says in Physiological Inquiries:—
“Stimulants do not create nerve power: they merely enable you, as it were, to use up that which is left.”
Dr. E. Smith:—
“There is no evidence that it increases nervous influence, while there is much evidence that it lessens nervous power.”
Dr. Wm. Hargreaves, of Philadelphia:—
“It is sometimes said by the advocates and defenders of alcohol, that by its use force is generated more abundantly. This it certainly cannot do, as it does not furnish anything to feed the blood or to store up nourishment to replenish the expenditure. For by their own theory, the increase of action must cause an increase of wear and tear; hence alcohol instead of sustaining life or vitality, must cause a direct waste or expenditure of vital force.”
Dr. Auguste Forel, of Switzerland:—
“All alcoholic liquors are poisons, and especially brain-poisons, and their use shortens life. They cannot therefore be regarded as sources of nourishment or force. They should be resisted as much as opium, morphia, cocaine, hashish and the like.”
Dr. W. F. Pechuman, of Detroit, in his valuable little treatise, Alcohol—Is it a Medicine? says clearly:—
“When alcohol or any other irritant poison is put into the system, the conservative vital force, recognizing it as an enemy, at once makes an effort through the living matter to rid the system of the offender;—the heart increases in action and new strength seems to appear. Now, right here is where the great mass of people and a large number of physicians are deluded. They mistake the extra effort of the vital force to preserve the body against harmful agencies for an actual increase in strength as the result of the agent given; we wonder that they can be so blind as not to see the reaction which invariably occurs soon after the administration of their so-called stimulant.”
Dr. F. R. Lees, of England:—
“All poisons lessen vitality and deteriorate the ultimate tissue in which force is reposited. Alcohol is an agent, the sole, perpetual and inevitable effects of which are to avert blood development, to retain waste matter, to irritate mucous and other tissues, to thicken normal juices, to impede digestion, to deaden nervous sensibility, to lower animal heat, to kill molecular life, and to waste, through the excitement it creates in heart and head, the grand controlling forces of the nerves and brain.”
If alcohol is a destroyer of bodily force, as any ordinary observer of drinking men can readily see, it is a problem beyond solving, how it is going to give force to, or sustain vitality in, the patient hovering between life and death. Too often has it been the means of hastening into eternity those who, but for its mistaken use, might have recovered from the illness affecting them.
Food gives heat to the body.
Alcohol does not, but really robs the body of its natural warmth. This finding of science was received with the utmost incredulity when first presented to the medical world, but the invention of the clinical thermometer settled it beyond controversy. It is now believed by all but a very few of those who have knowledge of the physiological effects of alcohol. While Dr. N. S. Davis, of Chicago, was the first to demonstrate this fact, it was Dr. B. W. Richardson, of England, who succeeded in putting it prominently before the attention of physicians.
The normal temperature of the human body is a little over 98 degrees by Fahrenheit’s thermometer. If the temperature is found to be much above or below 98 degrees the person is considered out of health; indeed by this condition alone physicians are able to detect serious forms of disease. By the use of the clinical thermometer, placed under the tongue, it is easy to determine what agents acting upon the body will cause the temperature to vary from the natural standard. When alcohol is swallowed there is at first a decided feeling of warmth induced; if the temperature be taken now it will be found that in a person unaccustomed to alcohol the warmth may be raised half a degree; in one accustomed to alcohol the warmth may be raised a full degree, or even a degree and a half beyond the natural standard. But this warmth is only temporary, and is soon succeeded by chilliness.
Dr. Richardson says in his Temperance Lesson Book:—
“The sense of warmth occurs in the following way: When