Production of heat
"The first usual test for a force-producing food," says Dr. Hunt,
"and that to which other foods of that class respond, is the production ofheat in the combination of oxygen therewith. This heat means vital force, and
is, in no small degree, a measure of the comparative value of the so-called
respiratory foods. If we examine the fats, the starches and the sugars, we can
trace and estimate the processes by which they evolve heat and are changed into
vital force, and can weigh the capacities of different foods. We find that the
consumption of carbon by union with oxygen is the law, that heat is the
product, and that the legitimate result is force, while the result of the union
of the hydrogen of the foods with oxygen is water. If alcohol comes at all
under this class of foods, we rightly expect to find some of the evidences
which attach to the hydrocarbons."
What, then, is the result of experiments in this direction? They have been
conducted through long periods and with the greatest care, by men of the highest
attainments in chemistry and physiology, and the result is given in these few
words, by Dr. H.R. Wood, Jr., in his Materia Medica. "No one has been able
to detect in the blood any of the ordinary results of its oxidation." That
is, no one has been able to find that alcohol has undergone combustion, like
fat, or starch, or sugar, and so given heat to the body.
Alcohol and reduction of temperature.
Instead of increasing it; and it has even been used in fevers as an
anti-pyretic. So uniform has been the testimony of physicians in Europe and
America as to the cooling effects of alcohol, that Dr. Wood says, in his
Materia Medica, "that it does not seem worth while to occupy space with a
discussion of the subject." Liebermeister, one of the most learned
contributors to Zeimssen's Cyclopaedia of the Practice of Medicine, 1875, says:
"I long since convinced myself, by direct experiments, that alcohol, even
in comparatively large doses, does not elevate the temperature of the body in
either well or sick people." So well had this become known to Arctic
voyagers, that, even before physiologists had demonstrated the fact that
alcohol reduced, instead of increasing, the temperature of the body, they had
learned that spirits lessened their power to withstand extreme cold. "In
the Northern regions," says Edward Smith, "it was proved that the
entire exclusion of spirits was necessary, in order to retain heat under these
unfavorable conditions."
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