198. Effect upon the Heart. This forced overworking of the heart which drives it at a reckless rate, cuts short its periods of rest and inevitably produces serious heart-exhaustion. If repeated and continued, it involves grave changes of the structure of the heart. The heart muscle, endeavoring to compensate for the over-exertion, may become much thickened, making the ventricles smaller, and so fail to do its duty in properly pumping forward the blood which rushes in from the auricle. Or the heart wall may by exhaustion become thinner, making the ventricles much too large, and unable to send on the current. In still other cases, the heart degenerates with minute particles of fat deposited in its structures, and thus loses its power to propel the nutritive fluid. All three of these conditions involve organic disease of the valves, and all three often produce fatal results.
199. Effect of Alcohol on the Blood-vessels. Alcoholic liquors injure not only the heart, but often destroy the blood-vessels, chiefly the larger arteries, as the arch of the aorta or the basilar artery of the brain. In the walls of these vessels may be gradually deposited a morbid product, the result of disordered nutrition, sometimes chalky, sometimes bony, with usually a dangerous dilatation of the tube.
In other cases the vessels are weakened by an unnatural fatty deposit. Though these disordered conditions differ somewhat, the morbid results in all are the same. The weakened and stiffened arterial walls lose the elastic spring of the pulsing current. The blood fails to sweep on with its accustomed vigor. At last, owing perhaps to the pressure, against the obstruction of a clot of blood, or perhaps to some unusual strain of work or passion, the enfeebled vessel bursts, and death speedily ensues from a form of apoplexy.
Fig. 81.—Showing the Carotid Artery and Jugular Vein on the Right Side, with Some of their Main Branches. (Some branches of the cervical plexus, and the hypoglossal nerve are also shown.)
Note. “An alcoholic heart loses its contractile and resisting power, both through morbid changes in its nerve ganglia and in its muscle fibers. In typhoid fever, muscle changes are evidently the cause of the heart-enfeeblement; while in diphtheria, disturbances in innervation cause the heart insufficiency. ‘If the habitual use of alcohol causes the loss of contractile and resisting power by impairment of both the nerve ganglia and muscle fibers of the heart, how can it act as a heart tonic?’”—Dr. Alfred L. Loomis, Professor of Medicine in the Medical Department of the University of the City of New York.
200. Other Results from the Use of Intoxicants. Other disastrous consequences follow the use of intoxicants, and these upon the blood. When any alcohol is present in the circulation, its greed for water induces the absorption of moisture from the red globules of the blood, the oxygen-carriers. In consequence they contract and harden, thus becoming unable to absorb, as theretofore, the oxygen in the lungs. Then, in turn, the oxidation of the waste matter in the tissues is prevented; thus the corpuscles cannot convey carbon dioxid from the capillaries, and this fact means that some portion of refuse material, not being thus changed and eliminated, must remain in the blood, rendering it impure and unfit for its proper use in nutrition. Thus, step by step, the use of alcoholics impairs the functions of the blood corpuscles, perverts nutrition, and slowly poisons the blood.
