



Produced by Sandra Eder, Martin Pettit and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)






ALCOHOL AND THE HUMAN BRAIN.

BY

REV. JOSEPH COOK.

NEW YORK:

National Temperance Society and Publication House,
58 READE STREET.

1879.




ALCOHOL AND THE HUMAN BRAIN.

BY REV. JOSEPH COOK.


Cassio's language in Othello is to-day adopted by cool physiological
science: "O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal
away their brains! That we should, with joy, revel, pleasure and
applause, transform ourselves into beasts! To be now a sensible man, by
and by a fool, and presently a beast! O strange! Every inordinate cup is
unbless'd, and the ingredient is the devil."--Shakespeare, _Othello_,
Act II., Scene iii.

Central in all the discussion of the influence of intoxicating drink
upon the human brain is the fact that albuminous substances are hardened
by alcohol. I take the white of an egg, and, as you see, turn it out in
a fluid condition into a goblet. The liquid is a viscous, glue-like
substance, largely composed of albumen. It is made up of pretty nearly
the same chemical ingredients that constitute a large part of the brain
and the nervous system, and of many other tissues of the body. Forty per
cent of the matter in the corpuscles of the blood is albumen. I am about
to drench this white of an egg with alcohol. I have never performed this
experiment before, and it may not succeed, but so certain am I that it
will, that I purpose never to put the bottle to my lips and introduce
into my system a fiend to steal away my brain. Edmund Burke, when he
heard William Pitt say in Parliament that England would stand till the
day of judgment, rose and replied; "What I fear is the day of _no_
judgment." When Booth was about to assassinate Lincoln, his courage
failed him, and he rushed away from the theater for an instant into the
nearest restaurant and called for brandy. Harden the brain by drenching
it in alcohol and you harden the moral nature.

If you will fasten your attention on the single fact, that alcohol
hardens this albuminous substance with which I place it in contact, you
will have in that single strategic circumstance an explanation of most
of its ravages upon the blood and nerves and brain. I beg you to notice
that the white of an egg in the goblet does not become hardened by
exposure to the air. I have allowed it to remain exposed for a time, in
order that you may see that there is no legerdemain in this experiment.
[Laughter.] I now pour alcohol upon this albuminous fluid, and if the
result here is what it has been in other cases, I shall pretty soon be
able to show you a very good example of what coagulated albumen is in
the nervous system and blood corpuscles. You will find this white of an
egg gradually so hardened that you can take it out without a fork. I
notice already that a mysterious change in it has begun. A strange
thickening shoots through the fluid mass. This is your moderate
drunkard that I am stirring up now. There is your tippler, a piece of
him, [holding up a portion of the coagulated mass upon the glass
pestle]. The coagulation of the substance of the brain and of the
nervous system goes on. I am stirring up a hard drinker now. The
infinitely subtle laws of chemistry take their course. Here is a man
[holding up a part of the coagulated mass] whose brain is so leathery
that he is a beast, and kicks his wife to death. I am stirring up in
this goblet now the brain of a hardened sot. On this prongless glass
rod, I hold up the large part of the white of an egg which you saw
poured into this glass as a fluid. Here is your man [holding up a larger
mass] who has benumbed his conscience and his reason both, and has begun
to be dangerous to society from the effects of a diseased brain.
Wherever alcohol touches this albuminous substance, it hardens it, and
it does so by absorbing and fixing the water it contains. I dip out of
the goblet now your man in delirium tremens. Here is what was once a
fluid, rolling easily to right and left, and now you have the leathery
brain and the hard heart.

Distortions of blood discs taken from the veins of drunkards have been
shown to you here by the stereopticon and the best microscope in the
United States. All the amazing alterations you saw in the shape, color,
and contents of the blood discs are produced by the affinity of alcohol
for the water in the albuminous portion of the globules.

I am speaking here in the presence of expert chemists. You say I have no
business to know anything about these topics. Well, the new professor
in Andover on the relations between religion and science has no business
to know them. The new professor at Edinburgh University and in Princeton
has no business to know them. The lectureship at the Union Theological
Seminary in New York has no right to teach on these themes. There is
getting to be a tolerably large company of us who are intending to look
into these matters at the point of the microscope and the scalpel. In a
wiser generation than ours the haughty men who will not speak themselves
of the relations of religion and science, and will not allow others to
speak--veritable dogs in the manger--will be turned as dogs out of the
manger. I speak very strongly, for I have an indignation that can not be
expressed when it is said that men who join hands with physicians, and
are surrounded by experts to teach them the facts, have no right to make
inferences. Men educated and put into professorships to discuss as a
specialty the relation of religion and science have no right to discuss
these themes! We have a right as lawyers to discuss such topics before
juries, when we bring experts in to help us. I bring experts before you
as a jury. I assert the right of Andover, and Princeton, and New Haven,
and Edinburgh, and even of this humble platform to tell you what God
does in the brain, and to exhibit to you the freshest discoveries there
of both His mercy and wrath.

My support of temperance reform I would base upon the following
propositions:

1. Scars in the flesh do not wash out nor grow out, but, in spite of
the change of all the particles of the body, are accurately reproduced
without alteration by the flux of its particles.

Let us begin with an incontrovertible proposition. Everybody knows that
the scars of childhood are retained through life, and that we are buried
with them. But we carry into the grave no particle of the flesh that we
had in youth. All the particles of the body are in flux and are changed
every few years. There is, however, something in us that persists. I am
I; and therefore I am praiseworthy or blameworthy for things I did a
score of years since, although there is not a particle of my body here
now that was here then. The sense of the identity persisting in all the
flux of the particles of the system, proves there is something else in
man besides matter. This is a very unsubstantial consideration, you say;
but the acute and profound German finds in this one fact of the
persistence of the sense of identity in spite of the flux of the
particles of the body, the proof of the separateness of matter and mind.

Something reproduces these scars as the system throws off and changes
its particles. That something must have been affected by the scarring.
There is a strange connection between scars and the immaterial portion
of us. It is a mysterious fact, right before us daily, and absolutely
incontrovertible, that something in that part of us which does not
change reproduces these scars. Newton, when the apple fell on his
head--according to the fable, for I suppose that story is not
history--found in it the law of the universe; and so in the simple fact
that scars will not wash out or grow out, although the particles of the
flesh are all changed, we find two colossal propositions; the one is
that there is somewhat in us that does not change, and is not matter;
the other is, that this somewhat is connected mysteriously with the
inerasability of scars, which, therefore, may be said to exist in some
sense in the spiritual as well as in the material substance of which we
are made.

2. It is as true of scars on the brain and nervous system as of those on
any less important parts of the body, that they will not wash out, nor
grow out.

3. Scars on the brain or nervous system may be made by physical or
mental habits, and are the basis of the self-propagative power of
habits.

4. When the scars or grooves in which a habit runs are made deep, the
habit becomes automatic or self-acting and perhaps involuntary.

5. The grooves worn or scars made by good and bad habits may be
inherited.

Physical identity of parent and offspring, spiritual identity of parent
and offspring--these mysteries we have discussed here; and this two-fold
identity is concerned in the transmission of the thirst for drink. When
the drunkard who has had an inflamed stomach, is the father of a child
that brings into the world with it an inflamed stomach, you have a case
of the transmission of alcoholic scars.

6. While self-control lasts, a bad habit is a vice; when self-control is
lost, a bad habit is a disease.

7. When a bad habit becomes a disease, the treatment of it belongs to
physicians; while it is a vice, the treatment of it belongs to the
Church.

8. In probably nine cases out of ten, among the physical difficulties
produced by the use of alcohol, and not inherited, the trouble is a vice
and not a disease.

9. Alcohol, by its affinity for water, hardens all the albuminous or
glue-like substances in the body.

10. It thus paralyzes the small nerves, produces arterial relaxation,
and deranges the circulation of the blood.

11. It produces thus an increased quickness in the beating of the heart,
and ruddiness of countenance which are not signs of health, but of
disease.

Pardon me if I dwell a moment on this proposition, which was not made
clear by science until a a few years ago. You say that moderate drinking
quickens the pulse and adds ruddiness to the countenance, and that,
therefore, you have some reason to believe that it is a source of
health. I can hardly pardon myself for not having here a set of the
chemical substances that partially paralyze the small nerves. I have a
list of them before me, and it includes ether and the whole series of
nitrites, and especially the nitrite of amyl. If I had the latter
substance here, I might, by lifting it to the nostrils, produce this
flushing of the face that you call a sign of health in moderate
drinking. There are five or six chemical agents that produce paralysis
of the vessels of the minute circulation, and among them is alcohol. A
blush is produced by a slight paralysis of the small nerves in the
interlacing ends of the arteries and veins. If I had ether here, and
could turn it on the back of my hand and evaporate it, I could
partially freeze the skin, and then, removing the ether, you would see a
blush come to the back of the hand. That is because the little nerves
that help constrict and keep up the proper tone of the circulating
organs, are temporarily paralyzed. A permanent blush in the face of a
drunkard indicates a permanent injury to the blood vessels by alcohol.
The varicose vein is often produced in this way by the paralysis of some
of the nerves that are connected with the fine parts of the circulatory
organs. When the face blushes permanently in the drunkard the injury
revealed is not a local one, but is inflicted on every organ throughout
the whole system.

After moderate drinking you feel the heart beating faster, to be sure,
but it beats more rapidly because of the paralysis of the delicate
nerves connected with the arteries, and because of the consequent
arterial relaxation. The blood meets with less resistance in passing
through the relaxed circulatory organs, and so, with no additional force
in the heart, that organ beats more rapidly. It beats faster simply
because it has less force to overcome. The quickened pulse is a proof of
disease and not of health. (_See_ Dr. Richardson, Cantor Lectures on
Alcohol.)

12. Alcohol injures the blood by changing the color and chemical
composition of its corpuscles.

In the stereopticon illustrations, you saw that the red discs of blood
are distorted in shape by the action of alcohol. You saw that the
arrangement of the coloring matter in the red discs is changed. You saw
that various adulterations appeared to come into the blood, or at least
into visibility there, under the influence of alcohol. Lastly, you saw,
most terrible of all, an absolutely new growth occurring there--a sprout
protruding itself from the side of the red corpuscle in the vital
stream. Last year I showed you what some of the diseases of leprosy did
for the blood, and you see how closely alcoholism in the blood resembles
in physical effects the most terrific diseases known to man.

Here are the diseases that are the great red seal of God Almighty's
wrath against sensuality; and when we apply the microscope to them, we
find in the blood discs these sprouts, that greatly resemble each other
in the inebriate and in the leper. Dr. Harriman has explained, with the
authority of an expert, these ghastly growths. These sprouts shoot out
of the red discs, and he tells you that, after having been called before
jury after jury as an expert, sometimes in cases where life was at
stake, he has studied alcoholized blood, and that a certain kind of
spore, a peculiar kind of sprout, which you have seen here, he never saw
except in the veins of a confirmed drunkard. I think the day is coming
when, by microscopic examination of the blood discs, we can tell what
disease a man has