Alcohol and Disease
Here are a few corroborative facts, stated baldly, almost at random: Rauber found that a ten per cent. solution of alcohol "acted as a definite protoplasmic poison to all forms of cell life with which he experimented—including the hydra, tapeworms, earthworms, leeches, crayfish, various species of fish, Mexican axolotl, and mammals, including the human subject." Berkely found, in four rabbits out of five in which he had induced chronic alcohol poisoning, fatty degeneration of the heart muscle. This condition, he says, "seems to be present in all animals subject to a continual administration of alcohol in which sufficient time between the doses is not allowed for complete elimination." Cowan finds that alcoholic cases "bear acute diseases badly, failure of the heart always ensuing at an earlier period than one would anticipate." Bollinger found the beer-drinkers of Munich so subject to hypertrophied or dilated hearts as to justify Liebe in declaring that "one man in sixteen in Munich drinks himself to death."
Dr. Sims Woodhead, Professor of Pathology in the University of Cambridge, says of the effect of alcohol on the heart: "In addition to the fatty degeneration of the heart that is so frequently met with in chronic alcoholics, there appears in some cases to be an increase of fibrous tissue between the muscle fibers, accompanied by wasting of these tissues.... Heart failure, one of the most frequent causes of death in people of adult and advanced years, is often due to fatty degeneration, and a patient who suffers from alcoholic degeneration necessarily runs a much greater risk of heart failure during the course of acute fevers or from overwork, exhaustion, and an overloaded stomach, and the like, than does the man with a strong, healthy heart unaffected by alcohol or similar poisons."
It must be obvious that these words give a clue to the agency of alcohol in shortening the lives of tens of thousands of persons with whose decease the name of alcohol is never associated in the minds of their friends or in the death certificates.
Dr. Woodhead has this to say about the blood-vessels: "In chronic alcoholism in which the poison is acting continuously, over a long period, a peculiar fibrous condition of the vessels is met with; this, apparently, is the result of a slight irritation of the connective tissue of the walls of these vessels. The wall of the vessel may become thickened throughout its whole extent or irregularly, and the muscular coat may waste away as a new fibrous or scar-like tissue is formed. The wasting muscles may undergo fatty degeneration, and, in these, lime salts may be deposited; the rigid, brittle, so-called pipestem vessels are the result." Referring to these degenerated arteries, Dr. Welch says: "In this way alcoholic excess may stand in a causative relation to cerebral disorders, such as apoplexy and paralysis, and also the diseases of the heart and kidneys."
From our present standpoint it is particularly worthy of remark that Professor Woodhead states that this calcification of the blood-vessels is likely to occur in persons who have never been either habitual or occasional drunkards, but who have taken only "what they are pleased to call 'moderate' quantities of alcohol." Similarly, Dr. Welch declares that "alcoholic diseases are certainly not limited to persons recognized as drunkards. Instances have been recorded in increasing number in recent years of the occurrence of diseases of the circulatory, renal, and nervous systems, reasonably or positively attributable to the use of alcoholic liquors, in persons who never became really intoxicated and were regarded by themselves and by others as 'moderate drinkers.'"
"It is well established," adds Dr. Welch, "that the general mortality from diseases of the liver, kidney, heart, blood-vessels, and nervous system is much higher in those following occupations which expose them to the temptation of drinking than in others." Strumpell declares that chronic inflammation of the stomach and bowels is almost exclusively of alcoholic origin; and that when a man in the prime of life dies of certain chronic kidney affections, one may safely infer that he has been a lover of beer and other alcoholic drinks. Similarly, cirrhosis of the liver is universally recognized as being, nine times in ten, of alcoholic origin. The nervous affections of like origin are numerous and important, implicating both brain cells and peripheral fibres.
How the Poison Works
Without going into further details as to the precise changes that alcohol may effect in the various organs of the body, we may note that these pathological changes are everywhere of the same general type. There is an ever-present tendency to destroy the higher form of cells—those that are directly concerned with the vital processes—and to replace them with useless or harmful connective tissue. "Whether this scar tissue formation goes on in the heart, in the kidneys, in the liver, in the blood-vessels, or in the nerves," says Woodhead, "the process is essentially the same, and it must be associated with the accumulation of poisonous or waste products in the lymph spaces through which the nutrient fluids pass to the tissues. The contracting scar tissue of a wound has its exact homologue in the contracting scar tissue that is met with in the liver, in the kidney, and in the brain."
It is not altogether pleasant to think that one's bodily tissues—from the brain to the remotest nerve fibril, from the heart to the minutest arteriole—may perhaps be undergoing day by day such changes as these. Yet that is the possibility which every habitual drinker of alcoholic beverages—"moderate drinker" though he be—must face. This is an added toll that does not appear in the first price of the glass of beer or bottle of wine, but it is a toll that may refuse to be overlooked in the final accounting.