Word: alcoholic
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Drunkometers and other gizmos favored by highway police say that a man is drunk if his breath or blood shows a certain concentration of alcohol. But some men and women get reeling drunk on a couple of drinks while others can swig a fifth and not show it. Also, a man who has been putting away half a dozen highballs every evening for years without batting an eyelash may suddenly find himself getting the staggers after one cocktail...
Some of the reasons, writes Dutch-born Psychiatrist Joost A. M. Meerloo in Postgraduate Medicine, are physical and general. In a crowded, unventilated room there is less oxygen to burn the alcohol in the blood, so the effects of two or three drinks pile up and may make even a seasoned drinker drunk. There is also lower oxygen tension at high altitudes, so drinking is risky in the mountains or in unpressurized airplanes (Dr. Meerloo is not sure about pressurized cabins). In the humid tropics the easy burning of alcohol may cause "an uneasy feeling of congestion" and give...
...Meerloo accepts the popular view that drinking on an empty stomach is risky; food slows the absorption of alcohol into the blood (but fruit, which produces alcohol during digestion, aggravates the problem). He also gives some support to the gagsters who insist that it isn't the whisky in a highball that does the damage but the soda-carbonation, he says, speeds the passage of alcohol through the stomach and into the blood...
Then there are individual and highly variable reactions. A man who has had brain concussion cannot tolerate alcohol for a long time afterward. Others cannot tolerate it if they have taken antihistamine or ataractic drugs. It is not that the drugs themselves are dangerous, but that individuals with abnormal sensitivity react dangerously. Steady use of barbiturates is a more predictable peril, says Dr. Meerloo: it makes the midbrain more sensitive to the intoxication of chronic alcoholism, and many alcoholics, far from being put to sleep by barbiturates, become wildly excited after taking them...
...colic if the family had no other sedative in the house. The Rev. Dr. Albert P. Shirkey of Washington's Mount Vernon Place Methodist Church was outraged. "I feel it was a terrible blunder to prescribe 'toddies for toddlers,' " he intoned from the pulpit. "To give [alcohol] to children is to have them grow up with a taste for it-maybe a craving for it. Who knows but from so innocent a beginning another alcoholic joins the ranks...