ALCOHOL— IS IT A FOOD? 



By Willis G. Tucker, M.D. 



[Read before the Albany Institute, March 6, 1877.] 



The uses, abuses and effects upon the system of alcoholic 

 drinks, are subjects which have been much discussed, and 

 which may be viewed from a variety of standpoints. The 

 moralist considers the influence exerted by their use upon 

 society at large ; the jurist seeks to determine what laws 

 should be enacted to regulate their production and govern 

 their sale ; the physiologist busies himself with investigat- 

 ing their action upon the human system in a state of health, 

 and the medical man studies the results which follow their 

 administration in disease and their value as remedial 

 agents. Each of these points of view is separate and dis- 

 tinct, and if discussions upon the alcohol question are ever 

 to prove of value, their range must be limited within 

 natural bounds. Questions so important as those which 

 arise when the uses of alcohol are discussed, should be 

 dealt with rationally and logically. The wholesale de- 

 nunciations, arbitrary dogmatical assertions, and distorted 

 statistical statements so often put forth as arguments by 

 those who feel themselves called upon to agitate these ques- 

 tions, are entirely out of place in the discussion of such 

 important themes. 



Dismissing, then, all reference to those relations which 

 alcohol bears to social science, the law and to medicine, 

 let me ask your attention for a few moments this evening 

 to a single point connected with its physiological action — 

 our query being, are the effects of alcohol upon the system 

 such as will entitle it to a place among foods ? 



Of alcohol, by way of definition, little need be said, save 

 that it is a chemical product resulting from vinous fer- 

 mentation, an obscure process in which sugar is trans- 

 formed through the agency of some nitrogenized al bumeu oid 



