Habits that Handicap: The Menace of Opium, Alcohol, and Tobacco, and the RemedyTowns, Charles Barnes
Science
Habits that Handicap: The Menace of Opium, Alcohol, and Tobacco, and the Remedy
Towns, Charles Barnes
Alcoholism; Opium abuse -- United States; Tobacco use
The action of alcohol on the nervous tissues constitutes, in the eyes of
the majority, the main injury that alcohol does to a human being. Certain
it is that the action of alcohol on the brain does more to distort and
pervert a man's relationship with his environment than any other action
which alcohol has on the body. It is through the poison of this organ that
the personality of the individual is so changed and so poisoned that a
degeneration of the individual in character and morals is brought about.
It is here, too, that the widest differences of tolerance and intolerance
to alcohol are shown. Some men may consume enormous quantities and their
mental balance apparently remain intact. Other individuals cannot take a
single glass of wine without being distinctly affected by it, or rendered
unmistakably drunken. The gross injuries found in the brain of those dying
from the effects of alcohol are partly due to the effect of alcohol on the
circulation and the injury to the blood vessels, thus diminishing the
nutrition of the brain and injuring the brain tissue itself, and besides,
as we have seen in other viscera, to the increase in connective tissue.
It is not necessary here to go into the details of the minute formation of
the cells, how each cell is formed of a cell body and many branches, as
one may conceive, growing like a tree or bush with the many branches
stretching out and touching other branches of related and adjacent cells.
When these dendrites or branches are in contact, there is an
interrelationship between the processes of the two cells. Alcohol causes a
retraction of the tiny branches one from another and the cells are
dissociated, so that the mental processes become dissociated from each
other, and the cells themselves degenerate and are unable to carry on
their functions; thus we see the functions of memory and of the
reproduction of images by memory prevented, the inability of the mind to
reason, through the inability of the mind to call up former experiences,
feelings and ideas, and a weakening of the power of each cell to take in
impressions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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