Alcohol and the Pancreas

The Medical Response to Rising Alcohol Consumption in 18th and 19th-Century Europe

“…The connection between alcoholism and heart disease evidently had to wait until another day; until the time when scientific medicine was even more inductive and exact than it was in Huss' day. 84 Much more ostentatious and thus much more noticeable in this age was the corrosive influence that alcohol was having on the stomach. This attack was also commented upon by Huss, but he was not the first to notice this historically.…”

“…60 In this last regard, obviously Baird was appraising early on what is described almost universally in current medical terms as fatty liver. 61 The damage that the metabolism of ethanol could do to the liver was not, as it turned out, the center of these organic and pathological studies. For the prevailing view was that this disorder was more wide ranging in its desultory results than it was in its specific consequences for any one single organ.…”