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complish the result, and there is further required a phosphate. This phosphate unites with the sugar, forming the substance hexose-phosphate, and this yields to the zymase and co-enzyme, and the result is alcohol and carbonic acid. Pasteur made the most interesting investigation on the diseases of wine in 1864. He proved that the spoiling of wine, which then occurred, was due to the microbes. He further found that by exposing the bottled wine to a temperature between 122 degrees and 140 degrees F., these microbes lost their vitality and the spoiling of the wine was prevented. This process is called pasteurizing. In 1872 he made a similar investigation in regard to beer with a like result. Pasteurizing of beer increases its keeping qualities and the same process is now applied to milk.

To summarize, I would say that beer is a beverage in the preparation of which malted barley, rarely malted wheat, rice and corn or its products are used. The malt is extracted with hot water, an addition of hops is made, it is boiled and the solution constitutes the wort. The wort is cooled, the yeast is added, and the whole fermented to a finish. The sugar is split into alcohol and carbonic acid gas, a little free acid, glycerine and aromatic bodies in small quantities result. The product is beer.

The beer is then placed in vats that it may properly age and undergo slow after-fermentation and ripening. Finally it is filtered, placed in barrels or bottles. Bottled beer is generally pasteurized for the reason I have already stated. American beer usually contains from 5 to 6 per cent. of extract, that means soluble food products. It contains from 3 to 4 per cent. of alcohol.

One of the most interesting constituents that has been found in beer lately is a peculiar substance called lecithin. It had long been known that the phosphates were always present in beer, and the last discovery shows that they are absolutely essential to the process of fermentation. But the discovery of lecithin is especially interesting because lecithin is a substance which was found some time ago as a constituent of the brain. It is a very interesting compound, and when its presence in the brain was first discovered it attracted a great deal of attention. It was thought, even, that it might be the source of mental action, and some suggested the proper name for it would be "Denkstoff" or thinking stuff. They tell a good story about phosphorus. When they first discovered phosphorus in the brain, somebody discovered there was phosphorus in fish, and they started the story that fish would be a good food for the brain. And

so a young student wrote to Oliver Wendell Holmes, and wanted to know if the story was true, and if so, what would be the proper dose. So Dr. Holmes wrote him back: "My son, it is quite true that the brain contains phosphorus; it is equally true that fish contains phosphorus, and after carefully persuing your letter, I would say that the proper dose for you would be a whale on toast." When we come to consider the relation of beer to food, we are struck by the analogy between beer and bread. Bread is made from cereals; so is beer. The bread with little water is solid, the beer with more water is liquid. The yeast is employed in both. It produces alcoholic fermentation in both. It converts both into palatable and readily digested food. Both contain alcohol and carbon dioxide. Beer contains only from three to four per cent. of alcohol and is not intoxicating when taken in ordinary quantities. Beer also has bitter and aromatic bodies derived from hops, which give it an acceptable flavor and produce tonic effect.

You

Further, beer is one of the foods free from bacteria. might be afraid of water, of milk, but the method of making beer, drying, heating, pasteurizing and filtering it completely frees beer from bacteria. Beer is a food and wholesome; it contains carbohydrates and albuminoids and mineral materials required by our system; it is appetizing; it aids digestion, has enzymes.

I myself have been familiar with the use of beer as an article of food from my childhood. I remember the barrel of ale in my father's cellar. When I was seventeen I went to Germany to study and I learned to use beer as an article of food at the University of Göttingen. My first experience really came soon after I reached Göttingen when I made a walking tour through the Harz Mountains with three other Americans, and I remember to this day with satisfaction how I enjoyed the most perfect health, able to do a hard day's work every day, and as I was born in 1836 I think I am a pretty good specimen of the food value of beer.

You know we read in the papers a great deal about adulterations. Of course most of it is nonsense. I have had occasion to investigate the question, and I find that adulteration in beer is gross exaggeration. There may be misbranding, but there is no adultera

tion.

Beer does not make drunkards. The effect of prohibition would be to drive beer out of the household; it would deprive a large percentage of our population of a perfectly honest, wholesome, nutritious

article of food. There is drunkenness, there is intemperance, but it does not come from beer. If we are to have laws, let those laws be intelligent laws, laws that will discriminate between what does harm and what does not do harm. I think I have given you reasons enough why beer has become the national beverage in this country.

ALCOHOL AND INSANITY

The unscientific and therefore untruthful character of the assertion, constantly repeated in the propagandist literature, that the greater part of insanity is caused by alcoholism, is finely illustrated in a paper entitled Insanity Among the Jews, by A. A. Brill, Ph.B., M.D., and Morris J. Karpas, both of New York City. The article was read before the New York Neurological Society in April, 1914, and reprinted in the Medical Record of October 3, 1914.

Whether the Jews, as sometimes stated, show a greater tendency to become insane than other races is probably an unsettled question. It is an admitted fact, however, that the Jews contribute a very large quota to the insane population of our institutions, but only a correspondingly small part of it is ascribed to alcoholic psychoses. Yet the Jews, as a rule, are not abstainers; one might rather describe them as moderate users of intoxicants. This condition among the Jews would be wholly inexplicable if alcohol were responsible for insanity to the extent habitually claimed. Stated differently, insanity may be exceedingly prevalent among peoples quite independent of alcohol as a factor.

The authors of the paper under consideration refer to "Sichel's careful investigations based upon the records of the Frankfort Hospital for the Insane," and say among other things:

"He also found that the Jews contribute a very small percentage to the number of cases of alcoholic psychoses.

"Similar deductions have been reached by Kirby, who examined the admissions of the Manhattan State Hospital from October I, 1907, to September 30, 1908. He says: "The figures for the Jewish race bring out several interesting facts. One notices, first of all, that the Hebrews are practically free from alcoholic psychoses. The figures 0.32 per cent. (cf. author's statistics) represent a single case which occurred in a series of 182 cases of alcoholic insanity. I must also add that this particular patient, a man, is still under observation, having been over a year in the hospital, and certain features in the development of the psychosis, as well as the course of the disorder, suggest the possibility that the case may, after all, belong to the paranoid dementias. We notice the further interesting fact that the absence of alcoholic insanity in the

Hebrew is accompanied by the lowest figure for senile dementia and psychosis with organic disease. The most noteworthy fact gathered from the second column is that the Hebrew race shows. by far the greatest percentage of manic-depressive cases (28.43) and the Jew also stands highest in the psychoneuroses and constitutional inferiorities and in involution melancholia. In dementia præcox, with the exception of the English people (28.57 per cent.), the Hebrews are again foremost (27.47 per cent.). In the undifferentiated depressions they are next to the highest. We thus see that in the large group of the so-called functional psychoses, by which we mean those disorders in which certain endogenous or psychogenetic factors seem most important as upsetting causes, the Jewish people outnumber enormously any race.'

"Pilcz states that adolescent dementia (dementia præcox) and dementia subsequent to acute psychoses and psychoses depending on hereditary and degenerative bases are more frequent (periodic insanity, 28.8 per cent.; secondary dementia, 33.3 per cent.) among the Jews than non-Jews; he, too, found that alcoholic insanity is very rare among the Jews. Thus he quotes Seckinger as saying that, in his six years' service in the Allgemeine Krankenhaus in Vienna, he observed only one case of delirium tremens in a Jew, and that in his experience alcoholism plays no rôle in the etiology of other forms of insanity among Jews. His statistics of Jewish paretics are 18.75 per cent."

The authors have examined the statistical data of admissions to the Manhattan State Hospital (New York) for four consecutive years, 1908-1912. "The total number of admissions was 5,710 (2,803 men and 2,907 women), of which there were 1,203 Jews (588 men and 615 women). The Jews thus constituted 21 per cent. of the total admissions." Yet, in the diagnostic grouping of the patients, only eight of the men and none of the women were found insane from alcoholic psychoses. The percentage of admissions (Hebrews) classified under alcoholic psychoses is therefore 2.5 for the men and 0.0 for the women.

No doubt the striking immunity of Jews to insanity attributable to the abuse of alcohol is due, among other things, to their moderate habits, but not to their abstinence. The point to be emphasized, and one too often lost sight of, is that an unusually high note of insanity may be found among people quite independent of any influence of alcohol.

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