Temperance and teetotalism : an inquiry into the effects of alcoholic drinks on the human system in health and disease.
- William Benjamin Carpenter
- Date:
- 1849
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Temperance and teetotalism : an inquiry into the effects of alcoholic drinks on the human system in health and disease. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.
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![for this purpose we apprehend that the quantity requisite is far smaller than that which is usually administered; and that great injury is often done by over-stimu- lating the stomach, and thereby positively weakening its powers of supplying the real wants of the system. It is, again, by their temporary stimulus to the digestive operations, that fermented liquors seem to be occasionally useful during pregnancy and lactation. We believe that in every case in which the appetite is good, and the general system healthy, the habitual use of these stimu- lants is positively injurious; and the regular administration of alcohol with the professed object of sustaining the strength under the demand occasioned by the copious flow of milk, is one of the grossest pieces of quackery that can be perpetrated by any practitioner, legal or illegal. For alcohol affords no single element of the secretion; and if the materials of the latter are introduced into the system as fast as they are drawn out of it, there is no exhaustion. In a healthy subject, and under a proper system of general manage- ment, this will be the case ; and alcohol can do nothing but harm. But there are cases,—very few, however, in comparison with the whole,—in which the conditions of pregnancy and lactation produce an irritable state of the stomach, that pre- vents it from digesting or even receiving that food which the system really de- mands; and in some of these we have known the regular administration of a small quantity of alcoholic liquor more efficacious than any other remedy. In one instance of this kind that fell parti- cularly under our notice, in which the mother was most anxious to avoid the assistance of fermented liquors, the lacta- tion must have been early stopped, on account of the want of functional power in the stomach, and the very poor quality of the milk, had it not been that the administration of a single glass of wine or tumbler of porter per day was found to promote the digestive power to the requisite degree, and thus to produce a general invigoration of the system, which was speedily manifested in the improved condition of the child as well as of the mother. The small allowance we have mentioned never required an increase, and was relinquished without difficulty soon after the weaning of the infant. We believe, then, that cases are of no unfrequent occurrence in which, under some temporary depressing influence, the powers of the digestive apparatus are not adequate to supply the demand upon it made by the system, and that recourse may in such cases be advantageously had to alcohol as an equally temporary stimu- lus. But it is worthy of consideration whether, when it is thus administered for purely medicinal purposes, it may not be desirable to give it in such a medicinal form as will render it not peculiarly palatable or inviting, in order that the patient may have no inducement to con- tinue the use of it after the real demand has ceased to exist. There is another class of cases in which . it appears to us that alcohol may serve a most important purpose that no other substance can answer. We refer to those in which there is a positive deficiency of heat-producing materials in the system, and in wThich the digestive apparatus is for the time incapable of introducing such as are ordinarily most serviceable for this purpose. Such a condition is the result of many exhausting diseases, and ■ more particularly of certain forms of fever, in which, without any particular local affection, the powers of the whole system are prostrated by the action of a poison introduced into the blood. Day after day the fatty matter of the body is used up in the respiratory process, and no food is taken in to replace it; and thus, as in cases of simple starvation, the patients die of cold, unless some means be taken to sustain their heat. Now there is reason to believe that when alcoholic liquors are received into the stomach, ] they are taken into the circulation, not by the lacteals, but by the more direct channel afforded by the permeable walls of the capillaries of the mucous membrane. Theory would teach us that through such a thin septum the alcoholic fluid, being thinner than the blood, would pass towards the latter by endosmose ; and experiment fully con- firms this view, since it was found by Sir B. Brodie, that alcohol in strong doses exerts its usual effects upon the system, even though the thoracic duct be tied ; and MM. Bouchardat and Sandras have obtained evidence of its presence in the blood of the gastric veins. Thus, then, alcoholic fluids introduced into the stomach can be directly absorbed, with- out any of that preparation which the oleaginous or farinaceous materials of combustion require; and we can well understand, therefore, how, in the ad-](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b24919901_0028.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
