Medical Testimony On Alcohol
Dr. Ezra M. Hunt says: “The capacity of the alcohols for impairment of capabilities and the initiation and merchandising of natural lesions in vital elements, is unsurpassed with the aid of any document within the whole variety of medicine. The records as to this are so indisputable, and so far granted through the career, as to be no longer debatable . Changes in belly and liver, in kidneys and lungs, in the blood-vessels to the minutest capillary, and inside the blood to the smallest crimson and white blood disc disturbances of secretion, fibroid and fatty degenerations in almost each organ, impairment of muscular power, impressions so profound on both worried structures as to be often poisonous these, and such as those, are the oft manifested effects. And those aren’t restricted to those called intemperate.”

Professor Youmans says: “It is clear that, to this point from being the conservator of fitness, alcohol is an active and powerful purpose of ailment, interfering, because it does, with the respiration, the circulation and the nutrients; now, is some other end result viable?”
Dr. F.R. Lees says: “That alcohol have to make contributions to the fattening method under sure conditions, and convey in drinkers fatty degeneration of the blood, follows, as a matter of route, in view that, on the one hand, we’ve an agent that keeps waste depend with the aid of lowering the nutritive and excretory functions, and on the alternative, a direct poisoner of the vesicles of the essential movement.”
Dr. Henry Monroe says: “There isn’t any kind of tissue, whether wholesome or morbid, that won’t go through fatty degeneration; and there is no natural disease so difficult to the medical guy, or so hard of treatment. If, via the resource of the microscope, we have a look at a very exceptional segment of muscle taken from someone in precise health, we discover the muscular tissues firm, elastic and of a brilliant purple shade, made from parallel fibres, with stunning crossings or striae; however, if we in addition study the muscle of a person who leads an idle, sedentary existence, and indulges in intoxicating liquids, we discover, at once, a pale, flabby, inelastic, oily appearance. Alcoholic narcotization appears to supply this strange conditions of the tissues greater than another agent with which we are acquainted. ‘Three-quarters of the persistent contamination which the clinical guy has to treat,’ says Dr. Chambers, ‘are occasioned by using this ailment.’ The eminent French analytical chemist, Lecanu, observed as a good deal as a hundred and seventeen components of fats in a thousand parts of a drunkard’s blood, the best estimate of the amount in health being 8 and one-region parts, while the normal amount is not more than or three parts, in order that the blood of the drunkard includes 40 times in extra of the normal quantity.”
Dr. Hammond, who has written, in partial protection of alcohol as containing a food electricity, says: “When I say that it, of all different causes, is most prolific in interesting derangements of the brain, the spinal twine and the nerves, I make a declaration which my own revel in indicates to be correct.”
Another eminent physician says of alcohol: “It substitutes suppuration for increase. It facilitates time to produce the results of age; and, in a word, is the genius of degeneration.”
Dr. Monroe, from whom “Alcohol, taken in small quantities, or largely diluted, as inside the form of beer, reasons the belly steadily to lose its tone, and makes it established upon synthetic stimulus. Atony, or need of tone of the stomach, steadily supervenes, and incurable disorder of fitness results. Should a dose of alcoholic drink be taken every day, the heart will very regularly end up hypertrophied, or enlarged all through. Indeed, it’s far painful to witness how many humans are clearly laboring under ailment of the coronary heart, owing mainly to the usage of alcoholic liquors.”
Dr. T.K. Chambers, medical doctor to the Prince of Wales, says: “Alcohol is certainly the maximum ungenerous weight loss program there may be. It impoverishes the blood, and there is no surer avenue to that degeneration of muscular fibre so much to be feared; and in coronary heart ailment it’s miles extra particularly hurtful, through quickening the beat, inflicting capillary congestion and irregular circulate, and as a consequence automatically inducing dilatation.”
Sir Henry Thompson, a outstanding general practitioner, says: “Don’t take your each day wine below any pretext of its doing you accurate. Take it frankly as a luxurious one which should be paid for, via some individuals very lightly, by way of some at a high rate, but continually to be paid for. And, usually, some lack of fitness, or of mental power, or of calmness of mood, or of judgment, is the price.”
Dr. Charles Jewett says: “The late Prof. Parks, of England, in his remarkable work on Hygiene, has efficaciously disposed of the notion, long and very normally entertained, that alcohol is a treasured prophylactic wherein a terrible climate, bad water and different situations unfavorable to health, exist; and an unlucky experiment with the thing, within the Union army, at the banks of the Chickahominy, inside the 12 months 1863, proved conclusively that, in place of guarding the human constitution against the have an impact on of groups hostile to health, its use gives to them additional force. The scientific history of the British navy in India teaches the identical lesson.”
But why gift farther testimony? Is now not the proof whole? To the man who values excellent fitness; who could not lay the inspiration for ailment and struggling in his later years, we need no longer provide a single extra argument in want of whole abstinence from alcoholic beverages. He will eschew them as poisons.