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I once had the bizarre, though sad, opportunity of observing the same phenomenon in the brain structure of a person, who, in a paroxysm of alcoholic excitement, decapitated himself under the wheel of a train line carriage, and whose brain was instantly developed from the skull by the crash. The brain itself, entire, was before me inside 3 mins after the death.

It breathed out the odour of spirit most clearly, and its surfaces and minute structures were vascular in the max. It looked like it had been lately injected with vermilion.

The white matter of the cerebrum, studded with red points, could scarcely be distinguished, when it was incised, by its natural whiteness ; and the pia-mater, or internal vascular surface covering the brain, resembled a fragile web of coagulated red blood, so tensely were its fine vessels engorged.

I should add this condition extended thru both the bigger and the smaller brain, the cerebrum and cerebellum, but wasn’t so marked in the medulla or commencing portion of the backbone. The action of alcohol continued beyond the 1st stage, the function of the backbone is influenced. Thru this part of the nervous system we are accustomed, in health, to perform automated acts of a mechanical kind, which proceed methodically even if we are thinking or talking on other subjects. Under alcohol, as the spinal centres become influenced, these pure automated acts stop to be properly carried on. The hand may reach any object, or the foot be properly planted, the higher intellectual centre must be invoked to make the proceeding secure.

There follows quickly on this a deficient power of co-ordination of muscular movement. The frightened control of certain of the muscles is lost, and the twitchy impulse is kind of enfeebled. The muscles of the lower lip in the human subject customarily fail firstly, then the muscles of the lower limbs, and it is deserving of remark the extensor muscles give way sooner than the flexors. The muscles themselves, by this time, are also failing in power ; they reply more feebly than is natural to the nervous impulse ; they, too, are coming under the depressing influence of the paralyzing agent, their structure is momentarily demented, and their contractile power reduced. This alteration of the animal functions under alcohol, marks the second degree of its action. In young subjects, there’s now, sometimes, barfing with faintness, followed by steady relief from the load of the poison. The alcoholic spirit carried yet another degree, the cerebral or brain centres become influenced ; they are reduced in power, and the controlling influences of will and of judgment are lost. As these centres are unbalanced and thrown into chaos, the sane part of the character of the person gives way before the emotional, passional or organic part. The rationale is now off duty , or is fooling with duty , and all of the mere animal tendencies and sentiments are laid atrociously bare.

The yellow belly shows up more craven, the boaster more boastful, the wicked more merciless, the untruthful more false, the carnal more degraded. ‘ In vino veritas ‘ expresses, even, indeed, to physical accuracy, the true condition. The explanation, the feelings, the instincts, are all in a state of carnival, and in chaotic feebleness.

Finally, the action of the alcohol still extending, the improved brain centres are overpowered ; the senses are beclouded, the voluntary muscular exhaustion is perfected, sensibility is lost, and the body lies an insignificant log, dead by all but one-fourth, on which alone its life hangs. The heart still remains true to its duty , and although it just lives it feeds the respiring power.

And that the circulation and the respiration, in the otherwise inert mass, keeps the mass in the bare domain of life till the poison starts to pass away and the twitchy centres to revive again. It is cheerful for the inebriate that, as a rule, the brain fails so long before the heart that he has neither the power nor the sense to keep on his process of destruction up to the act of death of his circulation.

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