Because alcohol poisons the whole body and often produces kidney diseases, the drinker is apt to catch other diseases. Drinkers are the first to catch such diseases as smallpox and yellow fever. Where there are great numbers of cases, the drinkers are the first and often the only persons to die. This is because their skin and kidneys have been harmed by the alcohol and cannot throw off the poisons of the disease. Any kind of sickness will be worse in a drinker. Surgeons do not like to operate on drinkers, for their wounds do not heal so quickly as in other people.
When there is too little air, a fire burns slower, and makes a blacker smoke and more ashes. Alcohol takes some air from the cells of the body. So they burn with smoke and ashes of the wrong kind. The skin has to work harder to get rid of these, and sometimes it cannot do it well. Then the body is poisoned. The alcohol is burned and cannot poison the body any more. But it causes the body to make poisons, and so it is to blame. The poisons do great harm to the skin and kidneys. Alcohol causes more kidney disease than all other things put together.
WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED
1. Little tubes in the skin are always giving off ashes and waste matters in the perspiration.
2. Perspiration dries on the skin. So the skin must be washed often.
3. The kidneys get rid of more water and waste matter than the skin does.
4. Perspiration also gets upon the clothes and bed sheets. These must be washed too.
5. Dirty water from washing should be thrown out where it cannot run into a well.
6. The skin is thick and strong and keeps the body from being hurt.
7. The skin is covered with a layer of scales. The scales have no feeling.