The parts which first suffer from alcohol are those expansions of the body which the anatomists call the membranes. "The skin is a membranous envelope. Through the whole of the alimentary surface, from the lips downward, and through the bronchial passages to their minutest ramifications, extends the mucous membrane. The lungs, the heart, the liver, the kidneys are folded in delicate membranes, which can be stripped easily from these parts. If you take a portion of a bone, you will find it easy to strip off from it a membranous sheath or covering, if you examine a joint, you will find both the head and the socket lined with membranes. The whole of the intestines is enveloped in a fine membrane called the peritoneum. All the muscles are enveloped in membranes, and the fasciculi, or bundles and fibers of muscles, have their membranous sheathing. The brain and spinal cord are enveloped in three membranes; one nearest to themselves, a pure vascular structure, a network of blood-vessels; another, a thin serous structure; a third, a strong fibrous structure. The eyeball is a structure of colloidal humors and membranes, and nothing else. To complete the description, the minute structures of the vital organs are enrolled in membranous matter."
These membranes are the
filters of the body. "In their absence there could be no building of
structure, no solidification of tissue, or organic mechanism. Passive
themselves, they, nevertheless, separate all structures into their respective
positions and adaptations."
Membranous
deteriorations.
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To make clear to your
mind the action and use of these membranous expansions, and how alcohol
deteriorates them and obstructs their work, we quote again from Dr. Richardson:
"The animal
receives from the vegetable world and the earth, the food and drink it requires
for its sustenance and motion. It receives colloidal food for its muscles: combustible
food for its motion, water for the solution of its various parts, salt for
constructive and other physical purposes. These have all to be arranged in the
body, and they are arranged to employ the membranous envelopes. Through these
membranes nothing can pass that is not, for the time, in a state of aqueous
solution, like water or soluble salts. Water passes freely through them, salts
pass freely through them, but the constructive matter of the active parts that
is colloidal does not pass, it is retained in them until it is chemically
decomposed into the soluble type of matter. When we take for our food a portion
of animal flesh, it is first resolved, indigestion, into a soluble fluid before
it can be absorbed, in the blood, it is resolved into the fluid colloidal
condition, in the solids it is laid down within the membranes into a new
structure, and when it has played its part, it is digested again, if I may so
say, into a crystalloidal soluble substance, ready to be carried away and
replaced by the addition of new matter, then it is dialyzed or passed through,
the membranes into the blood, and is disposed of in the excretions.
"See, then, what an
all-important part these membranous structures play in the animal life. Upon
their integrity all the silent work of the building up of the body depends. If
these membranes are rendered too porous, and let out the colloidal fluids of
the blood the albumen, for example the body so circumstanced dies as if it were
slowly bled to death. If, on the contrary, they become condensed or thickened,
or loaded with foreign material, then they fail to allow the natural fluids to
pass through them. They fail to dialyze, and the result is, either an
accumulation of the fluid in a closed cavity or contraction of the substance
inclosed within the membrane or dryness of membrane in surfaces that ought to
be freely lubricated and kept apart. In old age we see the effects of
modification of membrane naturally induced. we see the fixed joint, the
shrunken and feeble muscle, the dimmed eye, the deaf ear, the enfeebled nervous
function.
"It may seem, at
first sight, that I am leading immediately away from the subject of the
secondary action of alcohol. It is not so. I am leading directly to it. Upon
all these membranous structures alcohol exerts a direct perversion of action.
It produces in them a thickening, a shrinking and an inactivity that reduces
their functional power. That they may work rapidly and equally, they require to
be at all times charged with water to saturation. If, into contact with them,
any agent is brought that deprives them of water, then is their work interfered
with the cease to separate the saline constituents properly and, if the evil
that is thus started, be allowed to continue, they contract upon their
contained matter in whatever organ it may be situated, and condense it.
"In brief, under
the prolonged influence of alcohol those changes which take place from it in
the blood corpuscles, extend to the other organic parts, involving them in
structural deteriorations, which are always dangerous, and are often ultimately
fatal."