king of this desperate effort to claim alcohol as a food, Dr. N.S.
Davis well says: "It seems hardly possible that men of eminent
attainments in the profession should so far forget one of the most
fundamental and universally recognized laws of organic life as to
promulgate the fallacy here stated. The fundamental law to which we
allude is, that all vital phenomena are accompanied by, and dependent
on, molecular or atomic changes; and whatever retards these retards the
phenomena of life; whatever suspends these suspends life. Hence, to say
that an agent which retards tissue metamorphosis is in any sense a food,
is simply to pervert and misapply terms."

Well may the author of the paper from which we have quoted so freely,
exclaim: "Strangest of foods! most impalpable of aliments! defying all
the research of animal chemistry, tasking all the ingenuity of experts
in hypothetical explanations, registering its effects chiefly by
functional disturbance and organic lesions, causing its very defenders
as a food to stultify themselves when in fealty to facts they are
compelled to disclose its destructions, and to find the only defense in
that line of demarcation, more imaginary than the equator, more delusive
than the mirage, between use and abuse."

That alcohol is not a food in any sense, has been fully shown; and now,

WHAT IS ITS VALUE AS A MEDICINE?

Our reply to this question will be brief. The reader has, already, the
declaration of the International Medical Congress, that, as a medicine,
the range of alcohol is limited and doubtful, and that its
self-prescription by the laity should be utterly discountenanced by the
profession. No physician who has made himself thoroughly acquainted with
the effects of alcohol when introduced into the blood and brought in
contact with the membranes, nerves and organs of the human body, would
now venture to prescribe its free use to consumptives as was done a very
few years ago.

"In the whole management of lung diseases," remarks Dr. Hunt, "with the
exception of the few who can always be relied upon to befriend alcohol,
other remedies have largely superseded all spirituous liquors. Its
employment in stomach disease, once so popular, gets no encouragement,
from a careful examination of its local and constitutional effects, as
separated from the water, sugar and acids imbibed with it."

TYPHOID FEVER.

It is in typhoid fever that alcohol has been used, perhaps, most
frequently