An address on ardent spirit Author:Reuben Dimond Mussey Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: id The stomach and liver of drunkards are generally found to be disordered; the stomach frequently contracted, and the liver much harder than natural, exhibit... more »ing an unnatural colour both upon its surface, and throughout its interiour texture. This, perhaps, is what might be expected. The stomach receives the liquor, in the most concentrated and active form, in which it is taken into the body. From the stomach and the alimentary canal below, most, if not all of it, is probably carried through the liver in a state less dilute than when distributed among the remaining organs of the body. The texture of the liver too, which consists merely of vessels arid nerves with enough cellular membrane to hold them together, may perhaps serve to show why it is more obviously affected than the alimentary canal, inasmuch as this canal has a distinct, and in some places, a thick muscular coat, independently of its vessels The skin of the inebriate is always more or less afiected. Its fair colour soon fades under the withering influence of ardent spirit; and from being smooth, soft, and elastic, i't becomes uneven, wrinkled and flabby, if the subject be somewhat advanced in life ; or if young, the skin of the face is bloated, uneven and frequently purple, and very often in middle life and after, a large crop of red pimples is the only ornament the face exhibits. The eye, that window of the mind, loses its pearly whiteness, its sparkling transparency, its quick and significant motions, and becomes dim, slugglish- and unmeaning. The various phenomena exhibited in the different stages of alkoholick influence, including its immediate chapter{Section 4more permanent effects, and modified by age and constitutional temperament, would occupy more time in the enumeration, than can be spared on...« less