Dr. Richardson, in his lectures on alcohol, given both in England and America, speaking of the action of this substance on the blood after passing from the stomach, says:
"Suppose, then, a certain measure of alcohol be taken into the stomach, it will be absorbed there, but, previous to absorption, it will have to undergo a proper degree of dilution with water, for there is this peculiarity respecting alcohol when it is separated by an animal membrane from a watery fluid like the blood, that it will not pass through the membrane until it has become charged, to a given point of dilution, with water."
Process
The alcohol is diffused through this water, and there it comes in contact with the other constituent parts, with the fibrine, that plastic substance which, when blood is drawn, clots and coagulates, and which is present in the proportion of from two to three parts in a thousand; with the albumen which exists in the proportion of seventy parts; with the salts which yield about ten parts; with the fatty matters; and lastly, with those minute, round bodies which float in myriads in the blood (which were discovered by the Dutch philosopher, Leuwenhock, as one of the first results of microscopical observation, about the middle of the seventeenth century), and which are called the blood globules or corpuscles.
These last-named bodies are, actually, cells; their plates, when normal, have a smooth framework, they are discouraged in the inside, and they are red in shading; the shade of the blood being gotten from them. We have found that there exist different corpuscles or cells in the blood in considerably littler amount, which are called white cells, and these diverse cells drift in the circulation system inside the vessels. The red take the focal point of the stream; the white lie remotely close to the sides of the vessels, moving less rapidly. Our business is predominantly with the red corpuscles.
They play out the most vital capacities in the economy; they ingest, in extraordinary part, the oxygen which we breathe in breathing, and convey it to the outrageous tissues of the body; they retain, in incredible part, the carbonic corrosive gas which is delivered in the ignition of the body in the extraordinary tissues, and take that gas back to the lungs to be traded for oxygen there; to put it plainly, they are the crucial instruments of the course.
"With every one of these parts of the blood, with the water, fibrine, egg whites, salts, greasy issue and corpuscles, the liquor comes in contact when it enters the blood, and, in the event that it be in adequate amount, it produces exasperating activity. I have watched this unsettling influence deliberately on the blood corpuscles; for, in a few creatures we can see these drifting along amid life, and we can likewise watch them from men who are under the impacts of liquor, by expelling a spot of blood, and looking at it with the microscope.
The action of the alcohol, when it is observable, is varied. It may cause the corpuscles to run too closely together, and to adhere in rolls; it may modify their outline, making the clear-defined, smooth, outer edge irregular or crenate, or even starlike; it may change the round corpuscle into the oval form, or, in very extreme cases, it may produce what I may call a truncated form of corpuscles, in which the change is so great that if we did not trace it through all its stages, we should be puzzled to know whether the object looked at were indeed a blood-cell.
Every one of these progressions are because of the activity of the soul upon the water contained in the corpuscles; upon the limit of the soul to remove water from them. Amid each phase of change of corpuscles in this way depicted, their capacity to assimilate and settle gases is disabled, and when the accumulation of the cells, in masses, is extraordinary, different troubles emerge, for the cells, joined, pass less effortlessly than they ought to during that time vessels of the lungs and of the general flow, and hinder the current, by which neighborhood damage is created.
"A further activity upon the blood, founded by liquor in overabundance, is upon the fibrine or the plastic colloidal issue. On this the soul may act in two diverse routes, as indicated by the degree in which it influences the water that holds the fibrine in arrangement. It might settle the water with the fibrine, and in this manner annihilate the energy of coagulation; or it might separate the water so determinately as to create coagulation."