p. 431 | The Brain

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jul 29, 1886

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 12, No. 29.

The Brain.

THE brain, when healthy, is so soft that it would not retain its shape but for the skull. The sharpest knife is required to cut it without mangling its structure. It is necessary to immerse the organ in alcohol for weeks or months in order to harden it, when a careful examination is essential. A drunkard’s brain presents a contrast. It is already hardened, pickled almost. In the dissecting room, it affords rare pleasure to a medical student to secure the desiccated brain of an old toper. A celebrated anatomist declared that he could tell a drunkard’s brain in the dark, by the sense of touch alone. A London physician reported a case in which he found, upon making a post-mortem examination, so strong an odor of alcohol emanating from the brain that he applied a match to it, when it burst into a flame. The quantity of alcohol in the brain is sometimes so great that it can be collected by distillation after death.

It must not be supposed that every drunkard’s brain is as hard as a pickled one; but it may be fairly supposed that the hardening effect of alcohol has no little influence in the production of degenerations of the brain, such as result in various forms of progressive paralysis. Numerous functional disorders of the brain are also traced directly to the habitual use of alcoholic liquors. Locomotor ataxia, an almost hopeless malady, involving the brain and spinal cord, is very often the result of intemperance.—Temperance Reformer.