Vitamins for Drinks

Polyneuritis is a painful and sometimes paralyzing disease characterized by widespread inflammation of the nerves. It is frequently observed in persons who are chronic alcoholics. During the past five years Dr. Norman Hayhurst Jolliffe, psychiatrist for New York City's municipal hospitals, made a special study of 1,000 cases of alcoholism in the city's dingy old Bellevue Hospital. He found 22.6% of

Bellevue's drinkers afflicted with polyneuritis. These he treated by giving them Vitamin B. Last week he reported that Vitamin B treatment had been "exceedingly helpful."

The old idea cherished by many neurologists was that nerve damage in alcoholics was caused by the alcohol itself. Dr. Jolliffe, an international authority on the physiology and pathology of heavy tippling, doubted this. Polyneuritis seemed to him more like a deficiency disease, such as the Oriental malady called beriberi which is also caused by lack of Vitamin B. Because alcohol is a food of high caloric content, it seemed to the scientist that many topers simply did not eat enough food to get enough of the vitamin. In every case where the vitamin intake was sufficient there was no polyneuritis.

During his researches, Dr. Jolliffe ran across a bartender who had drunk ten one-and-one-half-ounce jiggers of whiskey every day for 40 years and ate little solid food, but whose nerves were sound. Investigation revealed that the bartender poured every jigger of whiskey into a ten-ounce bar glass, filled it with milk, and drank that. The 75 ounces or so of milk thus consumed daily provided him with plenty of Vitamin B.

Pure Vitamin B was isolated from rice polishings by Robert R. Williams of Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1935, and later synthesized by Williams and J. K.

Kline of the Merck & Co. laboratories. From rice polishings it was very expensive but the synthetic manufacture is cheap. Merck & Co. markets the vitamin in one-gram, one-tenth-gram and one-hundredth-gram tablets but does not advertise to the public and sells only to the medical profession. Last week Dr. Jolliffe suggested that liquor makers might put a trace of the vitamin in their products before distributing them, by dissolving a half-milli-gram or so per pint. The cost to the liquor people would not be more than 1/2-c- a bottle. Or drinkers might buy their own Vitamin B, put it in their highballs or take it separately.

Vitamin B does not prevent or cure hangovers.

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