Is alcohol an alimentary article?

  • United Kingdom Alliance.
Date:
[1867?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Is alcohol an alimentary article?. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    mJiJr’ 3 JL IS ALCOHOL AN ALIMENTARY ARTICLE ? That there is still great need of general and accurate teaching in regard to this question, is evident from the fact, that while genuine authorities in physiology have long since answered in the negative, many pretenders to Science in the provinces, regu- larly retail in local papers the most exploded notions as to the dietetic value of alcoholics. One recent example shall suffice. In an Ayrshire paper, a writer alleges (on the ground of a Chemical table giving the ‘ units of heat ’ * supposed to result from the artificial and complete combustion of the dried elements of certain substances), that Beer contains half the calorific power of Beef useable in muscular exertion ! The nature of this state- ment will be appreciated when we remind the reader, that while the Beef is almost entirely burnt up within the living body, the alcohol, the gummy matter, and the hop extract of Beer, are as surely eliminated unchanged by the excreting organs ; whence it follows that they cannot possibly yield a single unit of heat to the blood. + Everybody must see that, as the coals and chips that fall out of the grate, are not the fuel that actually boils the kettle, so a substance like alcohol, which is constantly cast out of the bodily furnace, cannot contribute to the warming of the living house. Nothing can exceed the folly of the comparison of artificial combustion in the chemist’s laboratory, where we can command all our conditions, with the actual, natural processes of the living frame, first assumed to he identical. The argument might have been just as logically expressed thus :— “ Sawdust, burnt up in the laboratory, yields an amount of heat approximating to the measure yielded by Bread: therefore Sawdust will actually yield so many units of heat in the blood ! ” In this form, however, the sophism is too transparent to deceive— in the other it is obscure, and so gives an excuse for tippling. * This means the relation of heat to force as determined by Mr Joule: viz., the heat resulting from the concussion of the fall of one kilogram (2£lbs avoir.) through 425 metres, which would raise one kilogram of water 1 degree C. in temperature. f French’s Bandworterhucli, iii. Blondlot’s Traite de la Digestion, p. 297. Simon s Archiv. i. Gtnelin's Verdauuug nach Versuchen, ii. Boussingault, ill Anna!, de Chemie, 3rd scr. xviii. Lehmann, iii. Of 50 grains of gum in mixture, 40 grains were found in the excrement, undigested. We know the old Traveller’s tale of persons in the Sahara living/or days on gum ; just as we know of the Indians, of Orinoco, living for weeks on clay Neither case applies to the ordinary circumstances of man ; for if the gastric juice does partly dissolve gum when men are starving and it has nothing else to digest, experiments clearly prove that it will not do so when it has anything better to operate upon. [2s. 6d. per 100.]