ven within the observation of every
thoughtful person. The exact or approximate facts relating to
alcohol can now be tested by instruments of precision. We can
weigh and measure the effects, and it is not essential to
theorize or speculate; we can test and prove with reasonable
certainty what was before a matter of doubt.

"Medical men who doubt the value of spirits are no more
considered fanatics or extremists, but as leaders along new and
wider lines of research. Alcohol in medicine, except as a
narcotic and anaesthetic, is rapidly falling into disfavor, and
will soon be put aside and forgotten."

CHAPTER XVI.

RECENT RESEARCHES UPON ALCOHOL.

In the year 1900 Prof. Taav Laitinen, of the University of Helsingfors,
Finland, published an account of experiments made upon 342
animals--dogs, rabbits, guinea pigs, fowls and pigeons--to determine the
effects of alcohol upon the resistance of the body to infectious
diseases. He used as infecting agents, anthrax bacilli, tubercle
bacilli, and diphtheria bacilli. The doses of alcohol given varied with
the animal. For his "small dose" experiments he used the quantity of
alcohol given as a food or as a medicine, or both, in a neighboring
sanitorium. The alcohol employed was, as a rule, a 25 per cent. solution
of ethyl alcohol in water. It was given either by esophageal catheter,
or by dropping it into the mouth from a pipette. It was administered in
several ways, and for varying times; sometimes in single large doses, at
others in gradually increasing doses for months at a time, in order to
produce here an acute, and there a chronic poisoning; in fact, he
produced the conditions consequent upon steady, moderate drinking.

His first conclusion from these experiments, most carefully carried out,
is that alcohol, however given, induces in the animal body a markedly
increased susceptibility to infectious diseases; and he maintains that
his experiments indicate that the use of alcohol, at least in the
treatment of anthrax, tuberculosis, and diphtheria, is not only useless
but probably injurious. From a number of other experiments carried out
with scrupulous care he comes to the same conclusion as Abbott, Welch,
and others that the predisposing to disease of alcohol must be explained
by its action in producing abnormal conditions--pathological changes in
the alimentary canal, liver, kidneys, heart, and nervous system. He
found that