Drunkard's Digestion

In last week's Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Harry Blotner, young Boston stomach specialist, published the first proof that a heavy drinker does not digest his food. Anyone can repeat in his kitchen or parlor the experiment by which Dr. Blotner arrived at his conclusion.

Material: one hard-boiled egg, one jigger of any alcoholic liquor, small quantities of trypsin and pancreatin, digestive enzymes present in stomach juice and procurable in any drugstore.

Method: dilute the enzymes with a small quantity of plain water, pour in two glasses. Drop pieces of the hard-boiled egg-white into both glasses. Into one glass, pour the alcohol, let both mixtures set overnight. By morning the egg-white in the alcoholized tumbler will still be there, unaffected, whereas in the unalcoholized tumbler, the egg-white will be liquefied.

To demonstrate that his thesis worked outside the laboratory, Dr. Blotner, 35, who strayed into this physiological bypath while trying to find out why diabetics cannot take insulin by mouth, performed the same experiment with digestive juice extracted by means of a stomach pump from healthy teetotalers. Natural gastric juices digested hard-boiled eggs in a few hours. Addition of alcohol completely arrested digestion.

At Boston City Hospital Dr. Blotner secured the stomach contents of eight drunkards who had been drinking one to two pints of whiskey a day for more than a week. Their digestive juices had no effect on hard-boiled eggs, "direct evidence," stated Dr. Blotner, "that large quantities of liquor taken over a long period of time destroy digestive enzymes and thus prevent the proper digestion and assimilation of food. Consequently a deficiency disease is produced." The disease: polyneuritis, which may progress so far that the drunkard continually walks as though stepping over obstacles, continuously talks of places and people he never saw.

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