Editorial note — Chapter VIII · Respiration.

“Most familiar and most dangerous is the drinking man’s inability to resist lung diseases.”—Dr. Adoph Frick, the eminent German physiologist of Zurich. “Alcohol, instead of preventing consumption, as was once believed, reduces the vitality so much as to render the system unusually susceptible to that fatal disease.”—R. S. Tracy, M.D., Sanitary Inspector of the N. Y. City Health Dept. “In thirty cases in which alcoholic phthisis was present a dense, fibroid, pigmented change was almost invariably present in some portion of the lung far more frequently than in other cases of phthisis.”—Annual of Medical Sciences. “There is no form of consumption so fatal as that from alcohol. Medicines affect the disease but little, the most judicious diet fails, and change of air accomplishes but slight real good.... In plain terms, there is no remedy whatever for alcoholic phthisis. It may be delayed in its course, but it is never stopped; and not infrequently, instead of being delayed, it runs on to a fatal termination more rapidly than is common in any other type of the disorder.”—Dr. B. W. Richardson in Diseases of Modern Life