I once had the unusual, though unpleasant, chance of watching the same phenomenon in the brain structure of a man, who, in a fit of drunken excitement, decapitated himself under the wheel of a train carriage, and whose brain was instantly evolved from the skull by the crash. Three minutes after the death, the complete brain was in front of me.
It oozed the flavour of spirit most strongly, and its walls and minute structures were circulatory in the extreme.
It appeared as though red had just been added to it. The pia-mater, or internal vascular membrane, which surrounds the brain, resembles a delicate web of coagulated red blood, so tensely are its fine vessels engorged that the white matter of the cerebrum, dotted with red dots, was so thin that it was nearly invisible after it was cut.
I should add that this state extended through both the bigger and the smaller brain, the cerebrum and cerebellum, but was not so marked in the medulla or beginning part of the spinal cord.
The Spinal Cord and Nerves.
Alcohol's effects persisted after the initial stage, affecting the spinal cord's functionality. Through this part of the nervous system we are adapted, in health, to perform automatic acts of a mechanical kind, which continue systematically even when we are thinking or speaking on other subjects.
Thus, a skilled worker will flawlessly complete his mechanical task even if his thoughts are focused on something else. Similarly, we all carry out our daily tasks in an entirely automatic manner without enlisting the help of the higher centers, unless an extraordinary circumstance arises that necessitates their assistance and causes us to deliberate before acting. Under drinking, as the spinal regions become affected, these pure reflex acts cease to be properly carried on.
That the hand may reach any object, or the foot be properly placed, the higher brain core must be called to make the process safe. There follows soon upon this a weak power of co-ordination of muscle movement. The nervous control of certain of the muscles is impaired, and the nerve stimulation is more or less enfeebled.
It is noteworthy that the extensor muscles give way earlier than the flexors, and in most cases, the lower lip muscles in human subjects give way before the lower limb muscles.
The muscles themselves, by this time, are also failing in power; they respond more feebly than is normal to the nervous stimulus; they, too, are coming under the lowering influence of the numbing agent, their structure is temporarily disordered, and their muscular power lessened.
This change of the animal processes under alcohol, indicates the second degree of its action. In young subjects, there is now, generally, vomiting with faintness, followed by slow relief from the load of the poison.
Effect On The Brain Centres.
The drunken spirit carried yet a further degree, the cerebral or brain centres become affected; they are lessened in power, and the guiding effects of will and of judgment are lost. As these areas are unstable and thrown into chaos, the logical part of the soul of the man gives way before the emotional, passional or organic part.
The reason is now off duty, or is playing with duty, and all the mere animal impulses and emotions are put atrociously bare. The wimp shows up more craven, the braggart more boastful, the cutthroat more cruel, the untruthful more false, the sexual more degraded. ' In vino veritas ' expresses, even, indeed, to physiological correctness, the true state.
The reason, the feelings, the instincts, are all in a state of joy, and in disorderly feebleness.
Finally, the action of the alcohol still extending, the higher brain centres are overcome; the senses are beclouded, the voluntary muscle prostration is perfected, sensation is lost, and the body is a simple log, lifeless except for a quarter, upon which it sits.
The heart still stays true to its job, and while it just lives it feeds the breathing power. And so the circulation and the breathing, in the otherwise inactive mass, keeps the mass within the bare sphere of life until the poison starts to pass away and the nerve centres to recover again.
The fact that the brain usually fails so much before the heart does means that the drunk is delighted because it gives him the ability to stop destroying things until his circulation stops altogether. Therefore he lives to die another day.