IS IT THE CAUSE OF DISEASE?
Besides the fact that alcohol had, before this committee's existence,
been proved to be neither a drink nor a food nor a medicine, it had also
been shown to be the cause of disease. Over five thousand of the most
prominent physicians in this country had so stated it, and the proportion
was equally great in all the enlightened countries of Europe. The most
pronounced in this way, perhaps, have been the great leaders in medical
science in Austria, Germany and France. Some of the points made
against the use of alcohol were that it interferes with digestion by rendering
insoluble the active principle of the gastric juice, and especially by
preventing the solution of body-building foods. The natural action of
various organs of the body is more or less arrested by alcohol, thus reducing
the temperature. This from Dr. Edmunds already quoted: "The
blood carries certain earthy matters in it in a soluble state, these earthy
matters being necessary for the nutrition of the bones and other parts of
the body. You all know that when wine is fermented and turned from
a weak sweet wine into a strong alcoholic wine, you get what is called
a `crust' formed on the inside of the bottle. What is that crust? That
crust consists of saline or earthy matters which were soluble in the
saccharine grape juice, but which are insoluble in the alcoholic fluids.
We find in drunkards that the blood vessels get into the same state as
the wine bottles from the deposit of earthy matter which has no business
to be deposited, and forms the `beeswing' or crust in the blood vessels
of the drunkard, in his eye and in all of the tissues of the body." Alcohol
had been found to prevent the elimination of waste, thus the body is
loaded with worn and decaying tissues, leaving the system an inviting
field for all sorts of diseases. Life insurance companies, influenced by
business interests wholly, make a distinction between liquor users and
non-users. Nelson, a distinguished actuary of England, employed as an
expert by life insurance companies, found after investigating over 7,000
cases, none of which were drunkards, that between the ages of 15 and
20 the proportion of deaths in total abstainers to those in moderate drinkers
is as 10 to 18; between the ages of 25 and 30, as 10 to 31; between
30 and 40 as 10 is to 40.
With reference to the effect on the offspring of drinking parents, the
medical profession had accepted the teaching of the French specialist, Dr.
Jaccound, that "of the children of drinkers some of them become imbeciles
and idiots; others are feeble in mind, exhibit moral perversion, and sink
by degrees into complete degeneration; still others are epileptics, deaf
and dumb, scrofulous, etc.," and of the English teacher, Dr. Kerr, that
"long continued habitual indulgence in intoxicating drink to an extent far
short of intoxication is not only sufficient to originate and hand down a
morbid tendency, but is much more likely to do so than even repeated
drunken outbreaks with intervals of sobriety between."
Thus the men who have been of the greatest honor to the profession
in every land were a unit in opposing the use of alcohol in health or
disease and in holding that if people are determined to use it there is less
danger in health, as then the system is in better condition to throw off
its evil effects.
