ALCOHOL AS A POISON AND IN DISEASE.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume XLII, Issue 7372, 25 January 1902, Page 4

ALCOHOL AS A POISON AND IN DISEASE.

Prof. G. Sims Woodhead, Professor of Pathology, Cambridge University, speaks thus definitely on aloohol as a poison. He says ;—; — 11 For the last year or two I have been keeping cote of the various observations that have been made in regard to the use of alcohol in disease, and I am coming to believe more and more firmly that not only is plcohol a physiological poison, bufc that when acting in conjunction with certain other poisons it renders these other poisons such assistance that they become much more virulent in their action, and therefore the patient who tak,J, or has taken, alcohol ha 3 a less chance of recovery than the patient who abstains." In a letter on the treatment of plague by alcohol, the Professor also makes the following statement regarding the action of alcohol in certain diseases. 11 It has been proved that alcohol exerts a deleterious effect when given in cases of hydrophobia when the Pasteur treatment is being applied. Experimentally it has been proved (hat lockjaw, anthrax, and supperation are all helped in one way or another by alcohol— i.e., they do more harm. Alcohol is no longer held to be a specific in inflammation of the lungs and in typhoid fever. Work ia now going on in Germany, and will shortly be published, demonstrating that alcohol helps the deadly diphtheria poison to do its work, and helps it in a most marked degree ; and physiologists generally, whatever individuals may say, are gradually coming to the conclusion that the long-vaunted ' action of alcohol on the heart' can be better brought about by the action of other drugs." Such a statement (says the Alliance News), coming from such a Eource, must command attention, and should result in a marked diminution of alcohol from the prescriptions of medical, men.