5 18  Therapeutic  Properties  of  Alcohol.  {Aocfober,Pi89a7"m' 
equally  so  it  is  that  our  mental  actions,  manifested  through  the  con- 
volutions of  the  brain,  are  regulated  by  exciters  and  inhibitors. 
Every  individual  whose  brain  is  in  its  normal  condition  has  fre- 
quent sensations,  impulses  or  exciters  of  mental  actions  which  he 
promptly  inhibits  or  disregards.  Indeed,  it  is  on  the  proper  devel- 
opment of  this  mental  inhibition  that  every  person's  self-control  and 
sense  of  propriety  depends. 
If  it  is  true,  as  has  been  already  stated,  that  alcohol,  when  taken 
into  the  living  system  in  large  doses,  is  an  active  poison,  quickly 
destroying  animal  life,  and  in  smaller  doses  is  an  anaesthetic,  directly 
diminishing  cerebral  sensibility  and  mental  consciousness  and  retard- 
ing all  metabolic  changes,  both  in  the  blood  and  tissues,  it  follows  as 
a  logical  and  necessary  inference  that,  if  administered  as  medicine,  it 
should  be  done  with  the  same  care  and  exactness  in  regard  to  purity, 
dose  and  time  that  we  exercise  in  prescribing  morphine,  quinine, 
aconite,  arsenic  or  any  other  active  drug.  This  cannot  be  done  by 
using  any  of  the  various  fermented  and  distilled  liquors  ordered 
either  from  drug  stores  or  liquor  dealers,  since  they  are  kept  at  no 
uniform  standard  of  either  strength  or  purity.  The  present  Pharma- 
copoeia recognizes  as  medicines,  vinum  or  wine,  spiritus  frumenti  or 
whiskey,  and  spiritus  vini  gallici  or  brandy,  but  does  not  give  a  defi- 
nite official  standard  of  alcoholic  strength  for  either  of  them.  Neither 
does  it  give  any  reliable  and  readily  available  tests  by  which  the 
strength  and  purity  of  the  articles  can  be  determined  by  the  ordinary 
practitioner  of  medicine.  Repeated  analyses  have  shown  that  the 
amount  of  alcohol  in  different  samples  of  wine  varies  from  6  to  25 
per  cent.;  in  whiskey,  from  35  to  50  per  cent.,  and  in  brandy,  from 
40  to  60  per  cent.  Such  variations  in  the  strength  of  any  other  medi- 
cine would  quickly  cause  its  standard  to  be  corrected,  or  its  exclusion 
from  the  official  list  of  drugs.  As  alcohol  is  the  only  important 
therapeutic  agent  in  all  these  liquors,  why  not  let  pure  alcohol 
of  fixed  strength  be  officially  recognized  to  the  exclusion  of  all  the 
varieties  of  both  fermented  and  distilled  drinks?  Then  every  practi- 
tioner desiring  to  give  alcohol  as  a  remedy  could  order  it  with  any 
desired  degree  of  dilution  with  water,  and  he  would  know  what  his 
patient  was  getting  and  how  much,  and  the  pharmacist  would  no 
longer  need  to  pay  for  a  license  to  sell  liquors,  or  to  be  classed  with 
the  ordinary  dealers  in  such  beverages.  One  of  the  most  important 
improvements  in  modern  pharmacology  consists  in  the  separation  of 
