Alcohol — is a a Food. 



137 



remarkable fact, nor indeed can be, we must dismiss it as 

 fallacious. Carpenter in his Prize Essay says : The power 

 of alcoholic liquors to enable the body to resist the de- 

 pressing influence of external cold is perhaps the best es- 

 tablished of all its attributes. This is by no 

 means surprising. The genial warmth which is experi- 

 enced for a time when a glass of spirits is taken on a cold 

 day, appears to afford unmistakable evidence of this heat- 

 producing power, and the chemical properties of alcohol 

 would seem to indicate that under such circumstances it 

 does not merely act as a stimulant * * * * hut that 

 it also offers the material for that combustive process, by 

 which the heat of the body is sustained, in a form pecu- 

 liarly suitable for rapid and energetic appropriation to this 

 purpose." ^ 



Now the results, almost without exception, of later 

 carefully conducted experiments go to show that alcohol 

 does not increase the quantity of carbonic acid in the ex- 

 pired air, but diminishes it, and that it does 7iot augment 

 the bodily temperature, but markedly lessens it. Regard- 

 ing the carbonic acid, the quantity of which would be 

 greatly increased were alcohol directly oxidized in the 

 system with the production of heat. Dr. Prout showed 

 thirty-five years since, that the amount is invariably but 

 not uniformly lessened by the administration of alcohol.^ 

 Bocker has shown that " in his own case during the use 

 of alcohol the exhalation of carbonic acid from the lungs 

 in twenty-four hours was less than the normal quantity by 

 165,744 cubic centemetres" ^ equal to about 5.8 cubic feet. 

 Dr. Hammond, in experiments conducted upon his own 

 person observed a constant diminution in the amount of car- 



1 Carpenter, op. cit, Phila., 186C, p. 96. 

 ' London Lancet, 1843-43, ii, p. 17. 

 3 Stille, op. cit., vol. i, p. 741. 

 Trans, ix.'] 18 



