230.  Effect of Alcoholics upon Disease.  A theory has prevailed, to a limited extent, that the use of intoxicants may act as a preventive of consumption.  The records of medical science fail to show any proof whatever to support this impression.  No error could be more serious or more misleading, for the truth is in precisely the opposite direction.  Instead of preventing, alcohol tends to develop consumption.  Many physicians of large experience record the existence of a distinctly recognized alcoholic consumption, attacking those constitutions broken down by dissipation.  This form of consumption is steadily progressive, and always fatal.

The constitutional debility produced by the habit of using alcoholic beverages tends to render one a prompt victim to the more severe diseases, as pneumonia, and especially epidemical diseases, which sweep away vast numbers of victims every year.

231.  Effect of Tobacco upon the Respiratory Passages.  The effects of tobacco upon the throat and lungs are frequently very marked and persistent.  The hot smoke must very naturally be an irritant, as the mouth and nostrils were not made as a chimney for heated and narcotic vapors.  The smoke is an irritant, both by its temperature and from its destructive ingredients, the carbon soot and the ammonia which it conveys.  It irritates and dries the mucous membrane of the mouth and throat, producing an unnatural thirst which becomes an enticement to the use of intoxicating liquors.  The inflammation of the mouth and throat is apt to extend up the Eustachian tube, thus impairing the sense of hearing.

But even these are not all the bad effects of tobacco.  The inhalation of the poisonous smoke produces unhealthful effects upon the delicate mucous membrane of the bronchial tubes and of the lungs.  Upon the former the effect is to produce an irritating cough, with short breath and chronic bronchial catarrh.  The pulmonary membrane is congested, taking cold becomes easy, and recovery from it tedious.  Frequently the respiration is seriously disturbed, thus the blood is imperfectly aerated, and so in turn the nutrition of the entire system is impaired.  The cigarette is the defiling medium through which these direful results frequently invade the system, and the easily moulded condition of youth yields readily to the destructive snare.

“The first effect of a cigar upon any one demonstrates that tobacco can poison by its smoke and through the lungs.”—­London Lancet.

“The action of the heart and lungs is impaired by the influence of the narcotic on the nervous system, but a morbid state of the larynx, trachea, and lungs results from the direct action of the smoke.”—­Dr. Laycock, Professor of Medicine in the University of Edinburgh.

Additional Experiments.