How to keep fit : a series of special lectures to young men delivered at the Central Y.M.C.A., London / by W. McAdam Eccles [and others].

Date:
[1914?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: How to keep fit : a series of special lectures to young men delivered at the Central Y.M.C.A., London / by W. McAdam Eccles [and others]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    that is the interesting point. The alcohol per- meates the shell, gets into the tissues that are grow- ing inside the shell, and you will find this curious change taking place. You can carry out this experiment in another way, and after the hatching of the chicken you can feed the chicken with grains (barley grains which have been soaked in water containing two per cent, of alcohol), and although they start when they are hatched equal, they then gradually show the difference compared with other chickens. In other words, the one chicken is unfit for the struggle of life as compared with the other. With the next slide we pass on to the human. Now here I am throwing on the ^creen three slides taken quite indiscriminately, but showing the con- dition that you can get in the human as a result of alcohol, and that not only directly but indirectly. These two children are the offspring of a father and a mother who were constantly soaking in alcohol. Of course, the important point to remember is this : the amount of alcohol that really does harm to the cell is only that alcohol that actually reaches the cell. If a man takes, we will say, a couple of ounces of alcohol (of course diluted—if he took pure alcohol he would very soon vomit it), it does not necessarily follow that all that alcohol is going to reach the actual cell tissue of the body. A good deal of it will be thrown off in other ways. But there is circulating in the blood a certain quantity of alcohol, because it is absorbed from the stomach into the blood; but you never get a higher per- centage of alcohol in the blood than two per cent., and that is the reason why we have been experi-