How to keep well : a text-book of physiology and hygiene for the lower grades of schools / by Albert F. Blaisdell.
- Albert F. Blaisdell
- Date:
- [1921]
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: How to keep well : a text-book of physiology and hygiene for the lower grades of schools / by Albert F. Blaisdell. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![not be allowed to hide the true character of alcohol, which is always depressant in kind, and which easily gets the upper hand of the effects just noted. In a word, alcohol, in respect to its inherent action, when once in the blood and tissues, must be classed with the anaesthetics and narcotics. — Professor J. J. Abel of Johns Hopkins University. 33. Fatty degeneration of the endothelial cells and sometimes of the smooth muscle is found with sufficient frequency in the blood vessels of different organs to be ascribed to the effect of the alcohol. — Professor W. H. Welch of Johns Hopkins University. 34. A man is as old as his arteries. If a man is forty years of age, and his arteries are as if he were eighty years of age, the man is that age, as far as his chances of life are concerned. Alcohol is only one of the causes of this hardening, I admit, but it is an important one. — Professor G. Sims Woodhead, Cambridge University, Eng- land. 35. More serious [than the effects of alcohol upon the liver] is the excessive deposit of fat in the muscle-substance of the heart, a condition that is called fatty heart. When the heart is thus infil- trated with fat, and in place of effective muscle-substance contains this inert, in a certain sense, dead mass, there is as a natural result a considerable lowering of the working ability of the heart, which, like a pump, has to drive the nourishing blood to all the body organs. Therefore the blood gradually becomes sluggish in the different organs, namely, in the respiratory, digestive, and nervous systems. Such persons have an irregular, weak heart-beat, a chronic laryngeal and bronchial catarrh develops, and digestion becomes constantly poorer and slower ; there are also brain and nerve derangements, due not only to the stagnation of the blood, but also to the direct action of alcohol upon the nerve cells. — Dr. Weichselbaum, Vienna. 36. The injurious effects of tobacco on the heart are well known. It is a common experience for the physician, in examining candidates for life insurance, to come unexpectedly, in an otherwise apparently](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b29821836_0271.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
