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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![Power must obviously be stored up in some available form, before it can be expended. In tbe human body, it exists as a concentration of cohesive, chemic, organic, and nervous forces, the sum of which expresses the actual strength or capacity of the constitution, for nutrition and excretion (health-power) ; for endurance and resistance of disease ; and for voluntary work with the surplus. Now these and all other forces, as a little reflection will show, are correlated, and many of them are mutually convertible—i. e., as one form disappears, it becomes another of exactly the same value or quantity. So much concentrated sun- power passed into wood or coal in growing, holding-together its parts, when separated in burning reappears as light and heat; the excess of heat above the boiling point passes into steam-force, and that vanishes into mechanical action and attrition, etc., to become once more light, heat, and electricity. In like manner, the forces of the sun interweave themselves into the texture of the golden- grain, and become fixed as cohesion or chemical attraction ; then bread made from that grain is digested into blood, part trans- formed into muscle, and part into oily and saccharine fuel in the circulation, and so is eventually decomposed in the performance of the function to which it was destined. Thus we return to-our starting point, for all this merely explains how force is liberated after being temporarily fixed, or stored-up for use. The law is thus stated by the philosopher Spencer, in his ‘ Principles of Biology’:—“Whatever amount of power an organism expends in any shape [or we may add, possesses], is the correlate and equivalent of a power that was taken into it from without ” (§63). Dr G. Budd, P.R.S., thus elaborates one aspect of the same truth, in his work on 1 Functional Disorders ’ :— “ Every kind of power an animal can generate, — the mechanica power of the muscles, the chemical (or digestive) power of the stomach, the intellectual power of the brain,— accumulates through the nutrition of the organ on which it depends” (1845). From the very nature of things it will now be seen, how impossible it is that Alcohol can be strengthening food of either kind. Since it cannot become a part of the body, it cannot con- sequently contribute to its cohesive, organic strength, or fixed- power; and since it comes out of the body just as it went-in, it cannot by its decomposition generate heat-force. In stricter words still, while power is displayed in the shape of quiet COHESION, holding together the atoms of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen in the peculiar form which alone constitutes Alcohol (C4 H Os), it cannot at the same time be also exhibited as the motion called ‘ heat,’ resulting from the dissolution of the elements previously cohering. It is in the light of this explanation that we are to understand the following authoritative distinctions between that which](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22444312_0007.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
