ls in adults as well as in children, for people are growing
and changing all through their lives.

Hence, when alcohol is administered in sickness the cells are hindered
in the full performance of their function of taking up food for the
building up of tissue, and as a consequence, the patient's body is
really robbed of nutriment by the agent which is supposed to be "keeping
up his strength." Truly, "Wine is a _mocker_, strong drink is raging,
and whosoever is _deceived_ thereby is not wise."

That alcohol interferes with the passage of waste matter from the body
is generally conceded. Indeed this is claimed by the advocates of its
medicinal use as one of its virtues: the fact that less waste passes
from the body being urged as evidence that there is less waste, that in
some way alcohol preserves tissue from being used up in the natural way.
Those who speak thus seem to think that they know better than the
Creator how the body should be treated. He made the body so that in
health, work, waste and repair should be equal to one another.

Dr. Ezra M. Hunt says in _Alcohol as a Food and as a Medicine_:--

"We believe that any one who will candidly review the claims put
forth for alcohol, in that it delays in any of these
hypothetical ways, tissue-change, will conclude that it has no
such power _in a salutary sense_, and that it is unwarrantably
assumed that to retard tissue metamorphosis (change) is
equivalent to tissue nutrition."

Dr. N. S. Davis says:--

"It seems hardly possible that men of eminent attainments in the
profession should so far forget one of the most fundamental and
universally recognized laws of organic life as to promulgate the
fallacy here stated. The fundamental law to which we refer is,
that all vital phenomena are accompanied by, and dependent upon,
molecular or atomic changes; and whatever retards these retards
the phenomena of life; whatever suspends these suspends life.
Hence, to say that an agent which retards tissue metamorphosis
is in any sense a food, is simply to pervert and misapply
terms."

Non-alcoholic physicians unite in declaring that the retention of waste
matter in the system, caused by alcohol, invites disease, and tends to
inflammatory action; and in illness retards, and frequently prevents,
recovery, for the germs of disease remain longer in the body than they
would were it not for the delay in the passage of e