course of alcohol in the living system, all confirm what all drinkers
feel, that it is to the brain alcohol hurries when it has passed the
lips. Some innocent dogs have suffered and died in this investigation.
Dr. Percy, a British physician, records, that he injected two ounces
and a half of alcohol into the stomach of a dog, which caused its
almost instant death. The dog dropped very much as he would if he had
been struck upon the head with a club. The experimenter, without a
moment's unnecessary delay, removed the animal's brain, subjected it to
distillation, and extracted from it a surprising quantity of
alcohol,--a larger proportion than he could distil from the blood or
liver. The alcohol seemed to have rushed to the brain: it was a blow
upon the head which killed the dog. Dr. Percy introduced into the
stomachs of other dogs smaller quantities of alcohol, not sufficient to
cause death; but upon killing the dogs, and subjecting the brain, the
blood, the bile, the liver, and other portions of the body, to
distillation, he invariably found more alcohol in the brain than in the
same weight of other organs. He injected alcohol into the blood of
dogs, which caused death; but the deadly effect was produced, not upon
the substance of the blood, but upon the brain. His experiments go far
toward explaining why the drinking of alcoholic liquors does not
sensibly retard digestion. It seems that, when we take wine at dinner,
the alcohol does not remain in the stomach, but is immediately absorbed
into the blood, and swiftly conveyed to the brain and other organs. If
one of those "four-bottle men" of the last generation had fallen down
dead, after boozing till past midnight, and he had been treated as Dr.
Percy treated the dogs, his brain, his liver, and all the other centres
of power, would have yielded alcohol in abundance; his blood would have
smelt of it; his flesh would have contained it; but there would have
been very little in the stomach. Those men were able to drink four,
six, and seven bottles of wine at a sitting, because the sitting lasted
four, six, and seven hours, which gave time for the alcohol to be
distributed over the system. But instances have occurred of laboring
men who have kept themselves steadily drunk for forty-eight hours, and
then died. The bodies of two such were dissected some years ago in
England, and the food which they had eaten at the beginning of the
debauch was undigested. It had been preserved in alcohol as we preserve
snakes.
Once, and only once, in the lifetime of man, an intelligent human eye
has been able to look into the living stomach, and watch the process of
digestion. In 1822, at the United States military post of
Michilimackinac, Alexis St. Martin, a Canadian of French extraction,
received accidentally a heavy charge of duck-shot in his side, while he
was standing one yard from the muzzle of the gun. The wound was
frightful. One of the lungs protruded, and from an enormous aperture in
the stomach the food recently eaten was oozing. Dr. William Beaumont,
U.S.A., the surgeon of the post, was notified, and dressed the wound.
In exactly one year from that day the young man was well enough to get
out of doors, and walk about the fort; and he continued to improve in
health and strength, until he was as strong and hardy as most of his
race. He married, became the father of a large family, and performed
for many years the laborious duties appertaining to an officer's
servant at a frontier post. But the aperture into the stomach never
closed, and the patient would not submit to the painful operation by
which such wounds are sometimes closed artificially. He wore a compress
arranged by the doctor, without which his dinner was not safe after he
had eaten it.
By a most blessed chance it happened that this Dr. William Beaumont,
stationed there on the outskirts of creation, was an intelligent,
inquisitive human being, who perceived all the value of the opportunity
afforded him by this unique event. He set about improving that
opportunity. He took the young man into his service, and, at intervals,
for eight years, he experimented upon him. He alone among the sons of
men has seen liquid flowing into the stomach of a living person while
yet the vessel was at the drinker's lips. Through the aperture (which
remained two and a half inches in circumference) he could watch the
entire operation of digestion, and he did so hundreds of times. If the
man's stomach ached, he could look into it and see what was the matter;
and, having found out, he would drop a rectifying pill into the
aperture. He ascertained the time it takes to digest each of the
articles of food commonly eaten, and the effects of all the usual
errors in eating and drinking. In 1833, he published a thin volume, at
Plattsburg on Lake Champlain, in which the results of thousands of
experiments and observations were only too briefly stated. He appears
not to have heard of teetotalism, and hence all that he says upon the
effects of alcoholic liquors is free from the suspicion which the
arrogance and extravagance of some teetotalers have thrown over much
that has been published on this subject. With a mind unbiassed, Dr.
Beaumont, peering into the stomach of this stout Canadian, notices that
a glass of brandy causes the coats of that organ to assume the same
inflamed appearance as when he had been very angry, or much frightened,
or had overeaten, or had had the flow of perspiration suddenly checked.
In other words, brandy played the part of a _foe_ in his system, not
that of a friend; it produced effects which were morbid, not healthy.
Nor did it make any material difference whether St. Martin drank
brandy, whiskey, wine, cider, or beer, except so far as one was
stronger than the other.
"Simple water," says Dr. Beaumont, "is perhaps the only fluid that is
called for by the wants of the economy. The artificial drinks are
probably _all_ more or less injurious; some more so than others, but
none can claim exemption from the general charge. Even tea and coffee,
the common beverages of all classes of people, have a tendency to
debilitate the digestive organs.... The whole class of alcoholic
liquors may be considered as narcotics, producing very little
difference in their ultimate effects upon the system."
He ascertained too (not guessed, or inferred, but _ascertained_, watch
in hand) that such things as mustard, horse-radish, and pepper retard
digestion. At the close of his invaluable work Dr. Beaumont appends a
long list of "Inferences," among which are the following: "That solid
food of a certain texture is easier of digestion than fluid; that
stimulating condiments are injurious to the healthy system; that the
use of ardent spirits _always_ produces disease of the stomach if
persisted in; that water, ardent spirits, and most other fluids, are
not affected by the gastric juice, but pass from the stomach soon after
they have been received." One thing appears to have much surprised Dr.
Beaumont, and that was, the degree to which St. Martin's system could
be disordered without his being much inconvenienced by it. After
drinking hard every day for eight or ten days, the stomach would show
alarming appearances of disease; and yet the man would only feel a
slight headache, and a general dulness and languor.
If there is no comfort for drinkers in Dr. Beaumont's precious little
volume, it must be also confessed, that neither the dissecting-knife
nor the microscope afford us the least countenance. All that has yet
been ascertained of the effects of alcohol by the dissection of the
body favors the extreme position of the extreme teetotalers. A brain
alcoholized the microscope proves to be a brain diseased. Blood which
has absorbed alcohol is unhealthy blood,--the microscope shows it. The
liver, the heart, and other organs, which have been accustomed to
absorb alcohol, all give testimony under the microscope which produces
discomfort in the mind of one who likes a glass of wine, and hopes to
be able to continue the enjoyment of it. The dissecting-knife and the
microscope so far have nothing to say for us,--nothing at all: they are
dead against us.
Of all the experiments which have yet been undertaken with a view to
trace the course of alcohol through the human system, the most
important were those made in Paris a few years ago by Professors
Lallemand, Perrin, and Duroy, distinguished physicians and chemists.
Frenchmen have a way of co-operating with one another, both in the
investigation of scientific questions and in the production of
literature, which is creditable to their civilization and beneficial to
the world. The experiments conducted by these gentlemen produced the
remarkable effect of causing the editor of a leading periodical to
confess to the public that he was not infallible. In 1855 the
Westminster Review contained an article by Mr. Lewes, in which the
teetotal side of these questions was effectively ridiculed; but, in
1861, the same periodical reviewed the work of the French professors
just named, and honored itself by appending a note in which it said:
"Since the date of our former article, scientific research has brought
to light important facts which necessarily modify the opinions we then
expressed concerning the _rôle_ of alcohol in the animal body." Those
facts were revealed or indicated in the experiments of Messrs.
Lallemand, Perrin, and Duroy.
Ether and chloroform,--their mode of operation; why and how they render
the living body insensible to pain under the surgeon's knife; what
becomes of them after they have performed that office,--these were the
points which engaged their attention, and in the investigation of which
they spent several years. They were rewarded, at length, with the
success due to patience and ingenuity. By the aid of ingenious
apparatus, after experiments almost numberless, they felt themselves in
a position to demonstrate, that, when ether is inhaled, it is
immediately absorbed by the blood, and by the blood is conveyed to the
brain. If a surgeon were to commit such a breach of professional
etiquette as to cut off a patient's head at the moment of complete
insensibility, he would be able to distil from the brain a great
quantity of ether. But it is not usual to take that liberty except with
dogs. The inhalation, therefore, proceeds until the surgical operation
is finished, when the handkerchief is withdrawn from the patient's
face, and he is left to regain his senses. What happens then? What
becomes of the ether? These learned Frenchmen discovered that most of
it goes out of the body by the road it came in at,--the lungs. It was
breathed in; it is breathed out. The rest escapes by other channels of
egress; it all escapes, and it escapes unchanged! That is the point: it
escapes without having _left_ anything in the system. All that can be
said of it is, that it entered the body, created morbid conditions in
the body, and then left the body. It cost these patient men years to
arrive at this result; but any one who has ever had charge of a patient
that has been rendered insensible by ether will find little difficulty
in believing it.
Having reached this demonstration, the experimenters naturally thought
of applying the same method and similar apparatus to the investigation
of the effects of alcohol, which is the fluid nearest resembling ether
and chloroform. Dogs and men suffered in the cause. In the moisture
exhaled from the pores of a drunken dog's skin, these cunning Frenchmen
detected the alcohol which had made him drunk. They proved it to exist
in the breath of a man, at six o'clock in the evening, who had drunk a
bottle of claret for breakfast at half past ten in the morning. They
also proved that, at midnight, the alcohol of that bottle of wine was
still availing itself of other avenues of escape. They proved that when
alcohol is taken into the system in any of its dilutions,--wine, cider,
spirits, or beer,--the whole animal economy speedily busies itself with
its expulsion, and continues to do so until it has expelled it. The
lungs exhale it; the pores of the skin let out a little of it; the
kidneys do their part; and by whatever other road an enemy can escape
it seeks the outer air. Like ether, alcohol enters the body, makes a
disturbance there, and goes out of the body, leaving it no richer than
it found it. It is a guest that departs, after giving a great deal of
trouble, without paying his bill or "remembering" the servants. Now, to
make the demonstration complete, it would be necessary to take some
unfortunate man or dog, give him a certain quantity of alcohol,--say
one ounce,--and afterwards distil from his breath, perspiration, &c.,
the whole quantity that he had swallowed. This has not been done; it
never will be done; it is obviously impossible. Enough has been done to
justify these conscientious and indefatigable inquirers in announcing,
as a thing susceptible of all but demonstration, that alcohol
contributes to the human system nothing whatever, but leaves it
undigested and wholly unchanged. They are fully persuaded (and so will
you be, reader, if you read their book) that, if you take into your
system an ounce of alcohol, the whole ounce leaves the system within
forty-eight hours, just as good alcohol as it went in.
There is a boy in Pickwick who swallowed a farthing. "Out with it,"
said the father; and it is to be presumed--though Mr. Weller does not
mention the fact--that the boy complied with a request so reasonable.
Just as much nutrition as that small copper coin left in the system of
that boy, plus a small lump of sugar, did the claret which we drank
yesterday deposit in ours; so, at least, we must infer from the
experiments of Messrs. Lallemand, Perrin, and Duroy.
To evidence of this purely scientific nature might be added, if space
could be afforded, a long list of persons who, having indulged in wine
for many years, have found benefit from discontinuing the use of it.
Most of us have known such instances. I have known several, and I can
most truly say, that I have never known an individual in tolerable
health who discontinued the use of any stimulant whatever without
benefit. We all remember Sydney Smith's strong sentences on this point,
scattered through the volume which contains the correspondence of that
delicious humorist and wit. "I like London better than ever I liked it
before," he writes in the prime of his prime (forty-three years old) to
Lady Holland, "and simply, I believe, from water-drinking. Without
this, London is stupefaction and inflammation." So has New York become.
Again, in 1828, when he was fifty-seven, to the same lady: "I not only
was never better, but never half so well; indeed, I find I have been
very ill all my life without knowing it. Let me state some of the goods
arising from abstaining from all fermented liquors. First, sweet sleep;
having never known what sweet sleep was, I sleep like a baby or a
plough-boy. If I wake, no needless terrors, no black visions of life,
but pleasing hopes and pleasing recollections: Holland House past and
to come! If I dream, it is not of lions and tigers, but of Easter dues
and tithes. Secondly, I can take longer walks and make greater
exertions without fatigue. My understanding is improved, and I
comprehend political economy. I see better without wine and spectacles
than when I used both. Only one evil ensues from it; I am in such
extravagant spirits that I must lose blood, or look out for some one
who will bore or depress me. Pray leave off wine: the stomach is quite
at rest; no heartburn, no pain, no distention."
I have also a short catalogue of persons who, having long lived
innocent of these agreeable drinks, began at length to use them. Dr.
Franklin's case is striking. That "water American," as he was styled by
the London printers, whose ceaseless guzzling of beer he ridiculed in
his twentieth year, drank wine in his sixtieth with the freedom usual
at that period among persons of good estate. "At parting," he writes in
1768, when he was sixty-two, "after we had drank a bottle and a half of
claret each, Lord Clare hugged and kissed me, protesting he never in
his life met with a man he was so much in love with." The consequence
of this departure from the customs of his earlier life was ten years of
occasional acute torture from the stone and gravel. Perhaps, if
Franklin had remained a "water American," he would have annexed Canada
to the United States at the peace of 1782. An agonizing attack of stone
laid him on his back for three months, just as the negotiation was
becoming interesting; and by the time he was well again the threads
were gone out of his hands into those of the worst diplomatists that
ever threw a golden chance away.
What are we to conclude from all this? Are we to knock the heads out of
all our wine-casks, join the temperance society, and denounce all men
who do not follow our example? Taking together all that science and
observation teach and indicate, we have one certainty: That, to a
person in good health and of good life, alcoholic liquors are not
necessary, but are always in some degree hurtful. This truth becomes so
clear, after a few weeks' investigation, that I advise every person who
means to keep on drinking such liquors not to look into the facts; for
if he does, he will never again be able to lift a glass of wine to his
lips, nor contemplate a foaming tankard, nor mix his evening toddy, nor
hear the pop and melodious gurgle of champagne, with that fine
complacency which irradiates his countenance now, and renders it so
pleasing a study to those who sit on the other side of the table. No;
never again! Even the flavor of those fluids will lose something of
their charm. The conviction will obtrude itself upon his mind at most
inopportune moments, that this drinking of wine, beer, and whiskey, to
which we are so much addicted, is an enormous delusion. If the
teetotalers would induce some rational being--say that public
benefactor, Dr. Willard Parker of New York--to collect into one small
volume the substance of all the investigations alluded to in this
article,--the substance of Dr. Beaumont's precious little book, the
substance of the French professors' work, and the others,--adding no
comment except such as might be necessary to elucidate the
investigators' meaning, it could not but carry conviction to every
candid and intelligent reader that spirituous drinks are to the healthy
system an injury necessarily, and in all cases.
The Coming Man, then, so long as he enjoys good health,--which he
usually will from infancy to hoary age,--will _not_ drink wine, nor, of
course, any of the coarser alcoholic dilutions. To that unclouded and
fearless intelligence, science will be the supreme law; it will be to
him more than the Koran is to a Mohammedan, and more than the
Infallible Church is to a Roman Catholic. Science, or, in other words,
the law of God as revealed in nature, life, and history, and as
ascertained by experiment, observation, and thought,--this will be the
teacher and guide of the Coming Man.
A single certainty in a matter of so much importance is not to be
despised. I can now say to young fellows who order a bottle of wine,
and flatter themselves that, in so doing, they approve themselves
"jolly dogs": No, my lads, it is because you are dull dogs that you
want the wine. You are forced to borrow excitement because you have
squandered your natural gayety. The ordering of the wine is a
confession of insolvency. When we feel it necessary to "take something"
at certain times during the day, we are in a condition similar to that
of a merchant who every day, about the anxious hour of half past two,
has to run around among his neighbors borrowing credit. It is something
disgraceful or suspicious. Nature does not supply enough of inward
force. We are in arrears. Our condition is absurd; and, if we ought not
to be alarmed, we ought at least to be ashamed. Nor does the borrowed
credit increase our store; it leaves nothing behind to enrich _us_, but
takes something from our already insufficient stock; and the more
pressing our need the more it costs us to borrow.
But the Coming Man, blooming, robust, alert, and light-hearted as he
will be, may not be always well. If, as he springs up a mountain-side,
his foot slips, the law of gravitation will respect nature's darling
too much to keep him from tumbling down the precipice; and, as he
wanders in strange regions, an unperceived malaria may poison his pure
and vivid blood. Some generous errors, too, he may commit (although it
is not probable), and expend a portion of his own life in warding off
evil from the lives of others. Fever may blaze even in his clear eyes;
poison may rack his magnificent frame, and a long convalescence may
severely try his admirable patience. Will the Coming Man drink wine
when he is sick? The question is not easily answered.
One valuable witness on this branch of the inquiry is the late Theodore
Parker. A year or two before his lamented death, when he was already
struggling with the disease that terminated his existence, he wrote for
his friend, Dr. Bowditch, "the consumptive history" of his family from
1634, when his stalwart English ancestor settled in New England. The
son of that ancestor built a house, in 1664, upon the slope of a hill
which terminated in "a great fresh meadow of spongy peat," which was
"always wet all the year through," and from which "fogs could be seen
gathering towards night of a clear day."[2] In the third generation of
the occupants of this house consumption was developed, and carried off
eight children out of eleven, all between the ages of sixteen and
nineteen. From that time consumption was the bane of the race, and
spared not the offspring of parents who had removed from the family
seat into localities free from malaria. One of the daughters of the
house, who married a man of giant stature and great strength, became
the mother of four sons. Three of these sons, though settled in a
healthy place and in an innoxious business, died of consumption between
twenty and twenty-five. But the fourth son became intemperate,--drank
great quantities of New England rum. He did _not_ die of the disease,
but was fifty-five years of age when the account was written, and then
exhibited no consumptive tendency! To this fact Mr. Parker added
others:--
"1. I know a consumptive family living in a situation like that I have
mentioned for, perhaps, the same length of time, who had four sons. Two
of them were often drunk, and always intemperate,--one of them as long
as I can remember; both consumptive in early life, but now both hearty
men from sixty to seventy. The two others were temperate, one drinking
moderately, the other but occasionally. They both died of consumption,
the eldest not over forty-five.
[2] Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker. By John
Weiss. Vol. II. p. 513.
"2. Another consumptive family in such a situation as has been already
described had many sons and several daughters. The daughters were all
temperate, married, settled elsewhere, had children, died of
consumption, bequeathing it also to their posterity. But five of the
sons, whom I knew, were drunkards,--some, of the extremest description;
they all had the consumptive build, and in early life showed signs of
the disease, but none of them died of it; some of them are still
burning in rum. There was one brother temperate, a farmer, living in
the healthiest situation. But I was told he died some years ago of
consumption."
To these facts must be added one more woful than a thousand such,--that
Theodore Parker himself, one of the most valuable lives upon the
Western Continent, died of consumption in his fiftieth year. The
inference which Mr. Parker drew from the family histories given was the
following: "Intemperate habits (where the man drinks a pure, though
coarse and fiery, liquor, like New England rum) tend to check the
consumptive tendency, though the drunkard, who himself escapes the
consequences, may transmit the fatal seed to his children."
There is not much comfort in this for topers; but the facts are
interesting, and have their value. A similar instance is related by Mr.
Charles Knight; although in this case the poisoned air was more deadly,
and more swift to destroy. Mr. Knight speaks, in his Popular History of
England, of the "careless and avaricious employers" of London, among
whom, he says, the master-tailors were the most notorious. Some of them
would "huddle sixty or eighty workmen close together, nearly knee to
knee, in a room fifty feet long by twenty feet broad, lighted from
above, where the temperature in summer was thirty degrees higher than
the temperature outside. Young men from the country fainted when they
were first confined in such a life-destroying prison; the maturer ones
_sustained themselves by gin_, till they perished of consumption, or
typhus, or delirium tremens."