Recent researches on the action of alcohol in health and in sickness : a lecture / by G. Sims Woodhead.

  • Woodhead, G. Sims.
Date:
1903
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Credit: Recent researches on the action of alcohol in health and in sickness : a lecture / by G. Sims Woodhead. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    whicGi i-esultH from ii degeneration of the little muscles, so arranged in the wall of the vessel that they form a kind of hollow cylinder. In certain alcoholics these muscles appear to undergo a fatty change similar to that met with in the heart muscle. Here, however, as in the fibrous condition, the fatty degeneration is folhwed by a curious (lei)osition of lime salts in the altered tissue, so that the ve.ssel, in place of being an elastic and contractile tube, comes to be a rigid tube almost like the pipe-stem form described above. It does not dilate to allow of the ready flow of blood, nor does it contract to drive it on. A very much greater amount of work is thus thrown upon the heart, which now has to drive the blood through a vessel from which it gets no assistance in the form of either muscular or elastic contraction, with the result that, having more work to do, the heart becomes hypertrophied or overgrown, a further amount of its reserve power and energy is used up, and this vital organ is brought still nearer the marginal line between safety and failure. Calcification or deposition of lime in the vessels has long been recognised as a sequel to fatty degeneration. It occurs in patients who, though not nece.ssarily drunkards, either intermittent oi- habitual, nevertheless, up to the later years of adult life or the earlier period of old age, have taken what are called moderate quantities of alcohol. This form of vascular disease, at one time scarcely associated with chronic alcoholism, is now supposed by some of our foremost physicians to be somewhat intimately associated with slight but long-continued alcoholism. Mv late friend Robert Irvine and 1,^ in some experiments on the depo- sition of carbonate of lime in living and dead tissues, found that tliis substance is very readily and regularly deposited from alkaline blood, and from blood that contains a high proportion of carbonic acid. Both of these conditions are present in the blood of animals that have received even small doses of alcohol There is some evidence that in human beings who take alcohol similar conditions obtain, and we may accept it that this process of calcification, through which the vessels become more brittle and less distensile, is, in many cases, a direct result of the conditions induced in the blood and tissues by alcohol, not necessarily in very large doses, but acting uninterruptedly over a long period. Changes Induced in the Brain by Alcohol. Of the changes that take place in the brain as the result of the administration of alcohol, our knowledge would be very limited had it been necessary to confine our attention to the human tissues, so many sources of error, both in observation and interpretation, here being possible. Fortunately, however, we are not without definite evidence on this point, as Dehio,'-* Colin C. Stewart,-’’ and Berkley* have all ' Proc. Roy. Soc. Edin., 1889, vol. xvi., pp. 3-24-.354. Centralhl. f. JSfervenh. u. Psychiat., Coblenz u. Leipzig, 1895, N.F., Bd. vi., S. 11.3. ® Journ. Exper. Med., N. Y., 1896, vol. i., p. 62.3. ‘ Johns HopkiiM Hosp. Rep., Baltimore, 1897, vol. vi., pp. 1-108, 15 plates; and Brain, London, 1895, vol. xviii., pp. 47.3-496, 5 plates.