WILL THE COMING MAN DRINK WINE?

Samoa Times and South Sea Gazette, Issue 38, 22 June 1878, Page 4

WILL THE COMING MAN DRINK WINE?

(Continued from our last) A traveller relates, that, when Russian troops are about to start upon a march in a very cold region, no grog is allowed to be served to tbeiu; and when the men are drawn up, ready to move, the corporals smell the breath of every man, and send back to quarters all who have been drinking. The leason is, that men who start under the influence of liquor are the first to succumb to the cold,and the like- i liest to be frostbitten. It is the uniform ! experience of the huuters and trappere in the northern provinces of North America, and of the Rocky Mountains, that alcohol diminishes their power to resist cold. This wholo magazine could be filled with testimony on this point. Still leas is alcohol a strength-giver. Every man that ever trained for a supreme exertion of strength knows that Tom Sayers spoko the truth when he said: "I'm no teetotaler: but when I've any business to do there's nothing like water and the dumb-bells." Richard Cobdon, whose powers were subjected to a far severer trial that a pugilist ever dreamed of, whose labours by night and day, during the corn law struggle, were excessive and continuous beyond those of any other member of the House of Commons, bears similar testimony: " The more work I have had to do, the more I have resorted to the pump and the teapot." On this branch of the subject, all the testimony is against alcoholic drinks. Whenever the point has been tested, —and it has oft.n been tested, —the truth has been confirmed, that he who would do his very best a d most, whether in rowing, lifting, running, watching, mowing, climbing, fighting, speaking, or writing, must not admit into his system one drop of alcohol. Trainers used to allow their men a pint of beer per day, and severe trainers naif a pint; but now the knowing ones have cut off even tbat moderate allowance, and brought their men down to oold water, md not too much of that, the soundest digesters requiring littlo liquid of any kind. Mr. Bigelow, by his happy publication lately of the correct version of Franklin's Autobiography, has called to mind the famous beer passage in that immortal work : " I drank only water; the other workmen, near fifty in number, were great guzzlers of beer. On occasions I carried up and down stairs a large form of types in each hand, when others carried but one in both hands." I have a long list of references on this point; but, in these cricketing, boat-racing, prizefighting days, the fact has become too familiar to require proof. The other morning, Horace Greeley, teetotaler, came to his office after an absence of several days, and found letters and arrears t)f ■work that would have been appalling to any man but him. He shut himself in at ten s.dl, and wrote steadily, without leaving his room, till eleven p.m.,—thirteen hours. When he had finished, he had some little difficulty in getting down stairs, owing to the stiffness of his joints, caused by the long inaction; but he was as fresh and smiling the next morning as though he had done nothing extraordinary. Are any of us drinkers of beer and wine capable of such a f oat ? Then, dur-

ing the war, when he was writing his history, he performed every day, for two years, two days' work, —one from nine to four, on his book; the other, from seven to eleven, upon the Tribune; and, in addition, he had more than would tire an ordinary man in the way of correspondence and public speaking. I may also remind the reader, that the clergyman who, of all others in the United States, expends most vitality, both with tongue and pen, and who doe* his work with least fatigue and most gayety of heart, is another ox Franklin's "water American's." If, then, win* doe* not nourish us, docs not assist the decomposition of f«d, does not warm, does not strengthen, what i.oes it do ? We all know that, when wo drink alcoholic liquor, it affects the brain immediately. Most of us are aware, too, that it affects the brain injuriously, lessening at once its power to discern and discriminate. If I, at this tena.m., full of interest in this eubjoot, and eager to get my view of of it upon paper, were to drink a glass of the beet port, Madeira, or sherry, or even a. glass of lager-beer, I should lose the power to continue in three minutes; or, •if I persisted in going on, I should be pretty sure to utter paradox and spurts of extravagance, which would not bear the cold review of to-morrow morning. Anyone can try this experiment Take two glasses of wine, aud then immediately apply yourself to the hardest task your liiiud ever has to perform, and you will find you cannot do it Let any student, just before he sits down to bis mathematics, drink a pint of the purest beer, and bo will be painfully conscious of loss of power. Or, let any salesman, before beginning with adiiiioult but important customer, perform the idiotio action of " taking a drink," and he will soon discover that his ascendency over his customer is impaired. In some way this alcohol, of which we are so fond, gets to the brain and injures it We are conscious of this, and we can observe it It is among tiiu wine-drinking classes of our fellow Leiugs that ahsurd, incomplete, and reactionary ideas prevail. The receptive, the curious, the candid, the trustworthy brains,—those that do not tako things for granted, and yet are over open to conviotion,—such beads are to be found on the .shoulders of men who drink little or none of these seductive fluids. How wo all wondered that England should think so erroneously, and adhere to its error so ohstinutoly, during our late war I Mr. iiiadstonc has iu part explained the mys-

tery. The adults of England, he said, in his famous wine speech, drink, on an average, three hundred quarts of beer each per annum ! Now, it is physically impossible for a human brain, muddled every day with a quart ol beer, to correctly hold correct opinions, or appropriate pure knowledge. Compare the conversation of a group of Vermont farmer!) gathered on the stoop of a couutry store on a rainy afternoon, with that which you may hear in the fanners' room of a market-town inn in England! The advantage is not wholly with the Vormonters; by no inoaus, for there is much in human nature l>esides the brain and the things of the brain. But in this one particular—in the topics of conversation, in the interest manifested in large and important subjects the water-drinking Verinontera are to the boer-driukiug Englishmen what Franklin was to the London printers. It is beyond the capacity of a well-beered brain evon to read the pamphlet on Liberty and Necessity which Franklin wrote in those times. The few experiments which have been made, with a viaw to trace the course of alcohol in tho living system, all confirm what all drinkers feel, that it is to the bruin alcohol hurries when it has passed tho lips. Some innocent dogs have suffered and died in thiß investigation. Dr. Percy, a British physician, records, that he injected two ounce.* 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 tho 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 efl'ect was produced, not upon tho substance of the blood, but upon the brain. His experiments go far toward explaining why the dri.iking of alcoholio li [uora 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 oonveyed 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 bad been treated as Dr. Percy treated the dogs, his brain, his liver, and all the other centres of power, would have yielded alcoh.il in abundanco; 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 bo distributed over

the system. But instances have occurred of labouring men who have kept themselves steadily drunk for forty-eight hours and then died. The boilies of two such were dissected some years ago in England, and the food which they had eaten at the beginning oi the debauch was undigested. It had been preserved in aKoiol as wo preserve snakes. Once, aud only once, in the lifetime ■ . man, an intelligent human eve has i < able to look into the living stomach, and watch the process of digestio.i. .1.1 m„ at the United States military post o. Michilimackinac, Alexis St. jlartin, :, 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 tho gun. Die wound was frightful. Ono of the lungs protruded, and from an enormous aperture in the stomach the food recently eaten was oozing. Dr. William Bauinout, 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 got out oi door-. and walk about the fort, an I ne con thued to improve in health and Btrengtn until he was as strong and hardy as mus 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 Htomach never closed, and the patient would not submit to the painful operation by which such wounds are sometimes closed Artificially. Ho wore a oompreas arranged by the doctor, without which his dinner was not safe after he bad eaten it By a blessed chance it happoncd 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 all'oided him by this unique event. Ho 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 (whioh remained two and a half inches in oiroumfenincc) he could watch the entire operation of digestion, and he did so hundreds of times. If the man's stomach aohod, ho could look into it and soo what was tho matter; and, having found out, he would drop a rectifying pill into the aporturo. Ho MOST(taincd the time it takes to digest each

if the articles of food oommonlv eaten, md tho etfeots of all the usual errors in eating ami 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. lie appears not to have heard of teetotalism and hence all that he Kays upon the effect.-) of alcoholic liquors is free from tho suspicion which the arrogance and extravagance of some teetotalers have thrown over much that has been published on this subject. With a mind unbia.st.eil, Dr. Beaumont, peering into the stomach of this stout Canadian, notices that » 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 over-eaten, 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 chargo. Even tea and coffee, the common beverages of all classes of people, have a tendency to debilitate the digestivo 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 j 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 j gastric juice, but pass from the stomach j 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. Alter drinking hard everyday 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 genera! dullness ami langour.

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 tho dissection of tho body favours the extreme position of the extreme teetotalers. A brain alooholisod the microscope proves tu he a brain diseased. Blood which h;is absorbed alcohol is unhealthy blood, —the misooscope shows it. The liver, the heart, and other organs, which have been accustomed to absord alcohol, all give testimony under the microscope which produces discomfort in tho mind of one who likes a glass of wine, and hopes to be abie 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 tho experiments which have yet been undertaken with a view to trace course of alcohol through the human system, the must 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 01 causing the editor of a leading periodical to confess to tho public that he was not infallible. In 1855 tho 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 honoured itself by appending a note in whioh it said : " Since the date of our former article, scientific research has brought to light important facts whioh necessarily modify the opinions we then expressed concerning the role of alcohol in the animal body. Those facts were revealed or indicated in the experiments of Mewsrs. Lallemand, Perrin, and Duroy. Ether and chloroform,—their mode of operation ; why and bow 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 whioh 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 bruaoh of professional etiquette as to cut off a pa- \ tient's head at the moment of complete : insensibility, ho would be able to distil i from the brain a great quantity of ether. ; But it in not usual to take that liberty ' except with dogs. (To be continued in our next.)