CHAPTER XLI

PHAGOCYTE AND ALCOHOL (CONTINUED)

The warfare within our bodies is a silent one. We hear no sign of any conflict; nevertheless, throughout our lives the strife goes on ceaselessly, and it makes all the difference between life and death to us whether or not our standing army of phagocytes is in good fighting trim.

In view of this fact our daily command to ourselves should be: Protect the phagocytes from harm. Every law of health is, indeed, so truly a law for their protection that he who follows health laws most strictly will at the same time be doing the most for his bodyguard. It is necessary, however, that we should know even more than this. Multitudes of cases prove the need.

In Glasgow, in 1848, a little more knowledge might have saved hundreds of lives. A great cholera epidemic swept through the city, and it attracted so much attention that Dr. Adams studied it for the sake of telling the people how to protect themselves. He kept a keen eye on the death rate of his cholera patients, and discovered that those who went without alcohol had a vastly better chance to recover than those who used it. Or, to put the facts more exactly, when those who used alcohol caught

the disease ninety-one out of every hundred died; whereas, when those who did not use alcohol had the cholera, only nineteen out of each hundred died.

Knowing what we do about the effect of alcohol on living tissue, and knowing also about the discoveries which Professor Metchnikoff made in connection with cholera microbes and phagocytes, we understand at once the condition of affairs in Glasgow. Those men and women who did not use alcohol owned phagocytes that were vigorous enough to conquer the attacking cholera microbes; those other men and women who used alcohol had weakened their phagocytes to such an extent that when invading enemies came they were not strong enough to slay them.

Dr. Delearde had two cases which illustrate precisely this point.

A man and a boy were bitten on the same day by the same mad dog. The boy, thirteen years old, was bitten on the head and face, which are the very worst places for such wounds. The man was bitten on the hand alone a much less serious matter. Both victims were taken to Dr. Delearde, and he gave each his most careful treatment; but the man, who should have recovered, died of hydrophobia, and the boy, who might have been expected to die, recovered. The only difference in the two cases seemed to be that the man used alcohol and that the boy did not use it.

This led Dr. Delearde to look into the subject still farther. As usual, when experiments have to be made, he took two sets of rabbits; to one set he gave a little alcohol each day; the other set received no alcohol. He then vaccinated both sets to try to prevent them all from taking hydrophobia. After they were supposed to be proof against the disease, he put the poison of hydrophobia into their blood and was not surprised at results. Those rabbits that had had alcohol took the disease as easily as if they had not been protected against it; whereas the poison had no effect whatever on the rabbits that had not had alcohol. Evidently their phagocytes had served them well.

In looking back to the seventeenth chapter of Good Health we now understand one reason why Bum and Tipsy suffered so much more than Nig and Topsy when the epidemic of dog illness raged in Worcester. Alcohol had weakened their phagocytes to such an extent that disease microbes had the upper hand from the start.

Just here it is necessary to call attention to an important fact. When death comes from disease microbes it is not the microbe itself, but the poison which the microbe gives off while it multiplies, that does the mischief. Each disease microbe has its own special variety of poisonof toxin — and fevers of one sort or another simply show that a fierce fight is going on between microbes that are

producing poison and phagocytes that are devouring the poison producers.1

Over and over again, in many microbe diseases, death comes from the fact that one set of nerve cells or another has been poisoned or paralyzed by the toxin which the microbes have produced. It is here, then, that the connection between phagocyte and nerve cell steps in. By destroying the microbe which makes poison, the phagocyte protects the nerve cell. Very often, therefore, the battle between phagocyte and microbe is a battle in behalf of the safety of the nerve cell from the poison produced by the microbe.

This is particularly true in that dread disease, pneumonia; and sometimes a doctor helps science by following the record of the battle. From time to time he draws a drop of blood from the arm of his patient and examines it under the microscope for phagocytes. He knows that according as the number of these protectors increases or decreases, so also is there prospect of life or death for the sufferer himself. The normal count is from five thousand to seven thousand in each cubic millimeter, and it takes sixty-one cubic millimeters to make one drop of water.

When, by his examination of the blood, the doctor finds that the number of phagocytes is mounting steadily

1 Pasteur's experiments which prove this are given in Chapter XXII of Town and City.

upward from ten to twenty thousand, from twenty to fifty and even to seventy thousand, he takes courage. He knows that "the body is rallying its forces to battle with invading hosts of microbes, and that, if the fight can be kept up long enough, the victory will be won."

Dr. Muirhead of Edinburgh, Scotland, was talking once about the treatment of pneumonia, and he said: "If I can get a patient who has had no alcohol I have very seldom any doubt as to the result of that attack of pneumonia, and I find that it is never necessary to give alcohol in those cases at all; in fact, patients do better without it." There are doctors who would not agree with Dr. Muirhead in this matter. Nevertheless it is true that, even as a medicine, all our best doctors, in our best hospitals and out of them, are in these later years giving vastly less alcohol to those who are ill than they gave in former times. They are understanding better and better the nature of the effect which it has on the life forces of the body.

Scientists claim that phagocytes are being manufactured constantly in certain lymph tissues, and that when a special need comes, when a wound is made in the flesh or when disease microbes multiply in the blood, then the tissues send out new regiments of soldiers by thousands and by millions. And it appears that, from the start, even the youngest among these soldiers are ready to risk their lives in immediate service.