of Paris. Food was scarce in the French army, and wine was liberally supplied. The men complained bitterly of the extreme chilliness which affected them. Dr. Klein, a French staff surgeon, was reported in the Medical Temperance Journal of England, October, 1873, as saying of this:—
"We found most decidedly that alcohol was no substitute for bread and meat. We also found that it was no substitute for coals. We of the army had to sleep outside Paris on the frozen ground. We had plenty of alcohol, but it did not make us warm. Let me tell you there is nothing that will make you feel the cold more, nothing which will make you feel the dreadful sense of hunger more, than alcohol."
There is no evidence against alcohol stronger than that which shows it to be not heat-producing, as commonly believed, but a reducer of heat in the body. Indeed, this question of bodily temperature is used in recent times to decide whether a man who has fallen upon the street is troubled by apoplexy, or influenced by alcoholism. If the clinical thermometor shows the temperature to be above normal, it is apoplexy; if below normal, it is alcoholism.
"Alcohol is clearly proved to not be a fuel-food, for if it were it would enable the body to resist cold, instead of making it colder; and in the extreme degrees of cold it would go on burning like other fuel-foods, and would maintain, instead of helping to destroy, life." Richardson's Lesson Book.
Yet because it creates a glow of warmth in the skin immediately after drinking it, thousands of
