BY FELIX L. OSWALD, M.D.

CHAPTER III.—PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF THE POISON HABIT.

Science tells us that there is a general progressive tendency in nature. According to the opinion of some modern biologists, all plants and animals have been developed from lower and less perfect organisms, and still continue their upward progress. We may reject that view, or accept it with considerable modifications; but one thing remains certain: Nature does not go backward of her own accord. Wherever the harmony of creation has not been wilfully disturbed the trees are as tall as of yore, the fruits as sweet and the flowers as fragrant. The eagle soars as high as ever, the song-thrush has not forgotten her anthems, nor the swallow her swift flight, the ostrich still scorneth the horse and his rider, it still requires a Samson to rend a young lion. How, then, can it be explained that the noblest work of Nature makes a sad exception to that rule? How is it that man alone is sinking in misery and disease, growing weaklier and sicklier from century to century, from generation to generation? War has not dealt us those wounds, famine and pestilence can not explain our “ailments and pains, in form, variety and degree beyond description.” The influence of all transient causes of evil is counteracted by the healing agencies of Nature. See the children of the wilderness, how soon they recover from hurts and wounds, how completely from the effects of protracted starvation, their off-spring as sound as their ancestors in Eden. No, the cause of our degeneracy must be a permanently active cause, and with the assurance of a clear and perfect conviction we can say: That restless enemy of human health and happiness is the poison vice.

Without the redeeming influence of nature, the balm of sleep and the regenesis[1] of every new birth, alcohol alone would have effected the destruction of the human race. During the gradual development of the vice the adaptive faculties of the human system have somewhat modified its influence, but its real significance reveals itself when its flood-gates are suddenly opened upon an unprepared race. In Siberia, in Polynesia, and among the aborigines of our own continent, the alcohol plague has raged with the destructiveness of the black death;[2] wigwams, villages, nay, entire districts have been depopulated in the course of a single generation. Among the Caucasian[3] nations, where the vice has gradually progressed from half-fermented must to brandy, its baneful effects are less sudden, but not less certain. From age to age the form created in the image of God has decayed, has shrunk like a building collapsing under the progress of a devouring fire. Wherever intemperance has increased, manhood and strength have decreased. The Anacreons[4] of antiquity indulged in wine only at occasional festivals. The peasants of the Middle Ages were generally too poor to use intoxicating drinks of any kind. But by and by wages improved. Strong ale and brandy were added to the home-brewed beverages of the working classes. Habitual stimulation, once the ruin of the idle aristocrat, became the curse of the masses. The poison marasmus[5] became a pandemic[6] plague. The yeomen of ancient England would not recognize their gin drinking descendants; a Norman Knight could have crushed a Stockholm dandy with a single grip of his fist. Challenge the apostles of lager beer, take them to Nuremberg, to the armory of the old City Hall, let them pick their champion from the ranks of the bloated and sickly looking citizens, defy them to find a single man able to wield the weapons that were toys in the hands of the old burghers. Or the advocates of “good, cheap, country wine”—take them to Spain and let them see what the best wine has done for the manliest race on earth. The inhabitants of Castile, of Aragon, Valencia, Barcelona and Leon are the descendants of the old Visigoths,[7] a race of rude warriors who overpowered the disciplined legions of Rome as easily as the Romans would have quelled a rabble of African rebels. Gibbon describes their first encounter with the Roman armies, how the imperial general invited the Gothic chieftains to a banquet, where he intended to assassinate their guards and attack their camps during the confusion, and how the Goths were saved by the intrepidity of their leaders: “At these words, Fritigern[8] and his companions drew their swords, opened their passage through the unresisting crowd, and, mounting their horses, hastily vanished from the eyes of the astonished Romans. The generals of the Goths were saluted by the fierce and joyful acclamations of the camp; war was instantly resolved, the banners of the nation were displayed according to the custom of their ancestors, and the air resounded with the march signals of the barbarian trumpet.” No painter’s magic could more vividly evoke the forms of that giant race, their chieftains making their way through a crowd of shrinking cowards, the tumult of the camp, and the iron-fisted warriors, receiving their leaders with exultant shouts! And those men were the ancestors of the modern Spaniards—lions shrunk into cats, eagles into mousing hawks! It is idle sophistry to ascribe that result to climatic influences. In a warmer climate than Spain the abstemious Arabs, the Afghans, and the Moors have preserved the vigor of their earliest ancestors. The soil that now produces lazzaroni[9] and musici[10] was once trod by the conquerors of three continents. In the snow-bound wigwams of the North American Indians a cold climate has not prevented the ravages of the alcohol plague. Poison has filled more graves than the sword, more than famine, and the plague and all the hostile powers of Nature taken together. The poison vice has shortened our average longevity by twenty years,[D] has turned athletes into cripples, giants into dwarfs.

Yet that result does not prove the vindictiveness of Nature; but her patience, the infinite patience that has prevented our utter self-destruction by mitigating the consequences of our suicidal follies. At night, while the drunkard sleeps his torpor sleep, the hand of our All-mother cools his fevered brow, the subtle alchemy of the organism allays the effects of the poison while the system performs at least a portion of its vital functions; in every child the influence of ancestral sins is modified by the tendency of redeeming instincts. If it were not for the restless activity of those remedial influences, fire-water alone would have caused more havoc than the deluge. From a pessimistic point of view the study of the physical effects of the poison vice might almost justify the conjecture of the biologist Hoffmann. “Nature,” says he, “has set limits to the over increase of every species of animals. Insects prey upon smaller insects, minnows upon midges, trouts upon minnows, pikes upon trouts, the fish-otter upon pikes, and man himself upon the fish-otter. Man himself has no earthly rival, but Providence (die Vorsehung) has met that difficulty by making him a self-destructive animal!”

If that shocking idea were not at variance with other facts, one might, indeed, admire the ingenious adaptation of means to ends, for if it were the intention of God to limit our prosperity and afflict us with every possible evil short of absolute annihilation, he could certainly not have chosen a more efficient agent than alcohol.

Alcohol, the rectified product of the vinous fermentation (i. e., decomposition) of various saccharine fluids, and included by chemists among the narcotic poisons, exercises a metamorphosic effect on every organ of the human body; and no fact in physiology is more incontestably established than that all its appreciable effects are deleterious ones. The advocates of alcohol base their claims upon vague theories. The opponents of alcohol base their claims upon obvious facts. It has been asserted that alcohol protects the system against cold, but the exponents of that theory have failed to show how the constituent elements of alcohol can take the place of the natural heat producers, the non-nitrogenous foods; they have also failed to explain a fact established by the unanimous testimony of polar travelers, namely, that a low temperature can be longer and more easily endured by total abstainers than by those who indulge in any kind of alcoholic drinks.

Alcohol has been called a “negative food,” because it retards the progress of the organic changes; but it has been demonstrated that that retardation is in every case an abnormal and morbid process, and that its results can not benefit the system in any appreciable way, while its deleterious effects are seen in the fatty degeneration of the tissues, the impoverished condition of the blood, and many other symptoms characterizing the influence of insufficient nutrition. Alcohol has been called a positive food, because, forsooth, it is derived (by a process of decomposition) from grain, fruits and other nutritive substances. We might as well call mildew a nutritive substance because it is formed by the decay of wholesome food. “There is no more evidence,” says Dr. Parker, “of alcohol being in any way utilized in the body, than there is in regard to ether or chloroform. If alcohol is to be still designated as food, we must extend the meaning of that term so as to make it comprehend not only chloroform, but all medicines and poisons—in fact, everything which can be swallowed and absorbed, however foreign it may be to the normal condition of the body, and however injurious to its functions. On the other hand, from no definition that can be framed of a poison, which should include those more powerful anÆsthetic agents, whose poisonous character has been unfortunately too clearly manifested in a great number of instances, can alcohol be fairly shut out.”

The antiseptic influence of alcohol was long supposed to constitute a safeguard against malarial diseases, but it has been found that the prophylactic[11] effect of distilled liquors is confined to the period of actual stimulation (the alcohol fever), and that in the long run abstinence is from eight to ten times more prophylactic than dram drinking.

Alcohol has been mistaken for an invigorating tonic; but we have seen that the supposed process of invigoration is a process of stimulation, or rather of irritation, and that we might as well try to “invigorate” a weary traveler by drenching him with aqua fortis.[12]

On the other hand, it has been proved by ocular demonstration that alcoholic liquids, applied to the living tissue, induce redness and inflammation, and cover the mucous lining of the stomach with ulcerous patches; that they change the structure of the liver, stud it with tubercles and disqualify it for its proper functions, though by obstructing its vascular ducts they often swell it to twice, and sometimes to five times, its natural size. The weight of a healthy liver varies from five to eight pounds, and Dr. Youmans mentions the post mortem examination of an English drunkard whose liver was found to weigh fifty pounds, and adds that in spite of this enormous enlargement of the bile-secreting organ, the man died from a deficiency of bile. The records of the Parisian charity hospitals have established the fact that the moderate use of alcoholic drinks during a period of five years is sufficient to permeate the substance of the liver with fatty infiltrations, and that the liver of old drunkards undergoes changes which make it practically a lump of inert matter, a mass of compacted tubercles and scirrhous[13] ulcers. Even in the advanced stages of the disorder a large dose of concentrated alcohol rouses the diseased organ into a sort of feverish activity which, however, soon subsides into a deeper and more incurable torpor. Hence the temporary efficacy and ultimate uselessness (to say the least) of alcoholic “liver regulators.”

It has also been proved that alcohol inflames the brain, obstructs the kidneys, impoverishes the blood, and impairs the functional vigor of the respiratory organs.

The infallible necessity of all these results can be more fully realized by a clear comprehension of the proximate causes, which may be summed up in a few words: While the organism has to waste its strength on the elimination of the poison, it must neglect its normal functions, or perform them in a hasty, perfunctory way. Let me illustrate the matter by an apologue.[14] A family of poor tenants occupy a cottage at the edge of the woods. They are honest, hard-working people, trying their best to live within their means, but at a certain hour they are every day attacked by a bear. Before the good man can mend his jacket, before the good wife has cooked her dinner, before the boys have finished their spelling lesson, they have to rally and fight that brute. Sometimes the bear comes twice a day. They generally manage to hustle him out of the premises, but if they return to their cottage the father’s jacket is torn into shreds, the dinner is burned, and in the excitement of the row the boys have forgotten their lesson. Their clothes are torn, their hands and faces bear the marks of the scrimmage, the whole household is in a state of the wildest disorder. The poor people go to work and try to repair the mischief the best way they can, but before they have finished the job the bear comes back, and another rumpus turns the house upside down. No wonder that things go from bad to worse, no wonder the tenants can not pay their rent; but a very considerable wonder that the landlord does not relieve them by killing that bear.

The manliest races of the present world are probably the Lesghian[15] and Daghistan[16] mountaineers, who inhabit the southern highlands of the Caucasus,[17] and who defied the power of the Russian empire for sixty-five years. From 1792 to 1858, army after army of schnapps drinking[18] Muscovites[19] attacked them from the north, east and west, and were hurled back like dogs from the lair of a lion, and fifteen hundred thousand Russian soldiers perished in the Caucasian defiles before the Russian eagles supplanted the crescent of Daghistan. For the heroic highlanders are Mohammedans, and total abstainers from intoxicating drinks. The Ossetes,[20] who inhabit the foothills of the northern range, are addicted to the use of slibovits[21] (peach brandy) and other stimulants, and their bloated faces present a striking contrast to the clean-cut features of the tribes who have been chosen as the representatives of the white race. They are as stubborn as their southern neighbors, but not as enterprising; as self-sacrificing in the defense of their country, but not as self-reliant. In spite of their healthy climate they are cachectic[22] and rather dull witted; alcohol has stunted their stamina as well as their stature.

But there are other forms of physical degeneration which can with certainty be ascribed to the influence of the secondary stimulants, tobacco, tea, coffee, and pungent spices. Tobacco makes the Turks indolent, tea and coffee make us nervous and dyspeptic; and the worst is that those minor vices pave the way to ruin; a constitution enfeebled by theÏne poison[23] is less able to resist the influence of fusel poison. It is a great mistake to suppose that abstinence from concentrated alcoholic liquors could atone for the habitual use of other stimulants. The vices of our ancestors were gross, but one-sided; ours are more manifold, and in their effects more comprehensive. In France many so-called temperate drinkers indulge in light wine, absinthe, tea, coffee and chloral, and are weaklier and sicklier than the Hungarian dram drinkers who confine themselves to plum brandy, for the system of the miscellaneous poison-monger has to defend itself against five enemies, and, as it were, sustain the wounds of five different weapons. The mediÆval knights and many Grecian and Roman epicureans could drink a quantity of wine that would kill a modern toper; but they confined themselves to that one stimulant, and showed sense enough to keep it from their boys, who had a chance to fortify their constitutions with gymnastics before they endangered them with alcohol, and not rarely thus fortified their mental constitutions to a degree that made them temptation proof. Pythagoras and Mohammed interdicted wine, and that statute did not interfere with the propagation of their doctrines, for voluntary abstainers were by no means rare—before the introduction of secondary stimulants. We fuddle our schoolboys with coffee and cider, and it is a curious and very frequent consequence of that early development of the stimulant habit that its victim forgets the happiness of his childhood and accepts daily headaches and chronic nightmares as some of the “ills that flesh is heir to.” Rousseau believed that a man would be safe against the poison vice if he could reach his twentieth year without contracting the habit, because in the meantime observation would have taught him the effects of intemperance. But his safety would be guaranteed by another circumstance. He would know what health means, and no deference to established customs would tempt him to exchange freedom for chains.

But a still greater mistake is the idea that drunkenness could be abated by the introduction of milder alcoholic drinks. We can not fight rum with lager beer. All poison habits are progressive, and we have seen that the beer vice is always apt to eventuate in a brandy vice, or else to equalize the difference by a progressive enlargement of the dose. Common brandy contains fifty per cent. of alcohol, lager beer about ten; so, if A. drinks one glass of brandy and B. five glasses of beer they have outraged their systems by the same amount of poison and will incur the same penalty. Total abstinence is the safe plan, nay, the only safe plan, for poisons can not be reduced to a harmless dose. By diminishing the quantities of the stimulant we certainly diminish its power for mischief, but as long as the dose is large enough to produce any appreciable effect that effect is a deleterious one.

Various diseases and that artificial disorder called intoxication react on certain faculties of the mind (by affecting their corresponding cerebral organ) as regularly as on the liver or any other part of the human organism. Consumption stimulates the love of life: a self-deluding hope of recovery characterizes the advanced stage of the disease as invariably as the hectic flush that simulates the color of health. Hasheesh excites combativeness. Alcohol first excites and gradually impairs self-reliance, and thus undermines the basis of truthfulness, of private and social enterprise, of manly courage and generosity. Moral cowardice, the chief reproach of our generation, has more to do with the tyranny of the poison vice than with the despotism of social prejudices. The brain stimulating effect of alcohol decreases with every repetition of the dose, and Dr. Theodore Chambers warns us that “however long the evil results of such habitual overtasking may be postponed, they are sure to manifest themselves at last in that general breakdown which is the necessary sequence of a long continued excess of expenditure over income.”

Besides, even the temporary results would not justify that expenditure. “Brain workers should confine themselves to metaphysical tonics,” says Dr. Bouchardat[24]; “alcoholic drinks, at any rate, are unavailable for that purpose. Even after a single glass of champagne I have found that the slight mental exaltation is accompanied by a slight obfuscation.[25] The mind soars, but it soars into the clouds.” “Wine stirs the brain,” says the poet Chamisso, “but not its higher faculties as much as the sediments that muddle it.”

The Arabs have a tradition that soon after the flood, when Nunus (the Arabian Noah) had resumed his agricultural pursuits, a Ghin, or spirit, appeared to him and taught him the art of manufacturing wine from grape-juice. “This beverage, O son of an earthly father,” said the Ghin, “is a liquid of peculiar properties. The first bumperful will make you as tame as a sheep. If you repeat the experiment you will become as fierce as a rampant lion. After the third dose you will roll in the mud like a hog.” If the Ghin had been a spirit of epigrammatic abilities he might have summarized his remarks: “The effects of this liquid, O Nunus, vary, of course, with the amount of the dose. But if you drink it you will infallibly make a beast of yourself.”

In the long list of artificial stimulants, with all their modifications and compounds, there is no such thing as a harmless tonic. Alcohol, especially, is in all its disguises, the most implacable enemy of the human organism. In large quantities it is a lethal[26] poison; in smaller doses its effects are less deadly but not less certainly injurious, and the advocates of moderate drinking might as well recommend moderate perjury. Our lager beer enthusiasts might just as well advise us to introduce a milder brand of rattlesnakes. The alcohol habit in all its forms and in every stage of its development, is a degrading vice.

[D] Since the end of the seventeenth century—i. e., since a time when medical delusions made every hospital a death trap—longevity has slightly increased, but, as compared with the first century of our chronological era, it has enormously decreased. Peasants outlive men of letters, and yet the records of the ancients show that nearly half their poets, statesmen and philosophers were centenarians. If the years of the patriarchs were solar years their average longevity was 280 years; if they were seasons (of six months), at least 120 years. The Bible years were certainly not months, for men who “saw their children and children’s children,” can not have died before their thirtieth year.