Medicine: Hot Milk for St. Bernards?

Physiologists know that alcohol is no real good for warming a badly chilled man. All it does is to flood the skin with blood drawn from vital internal organs, which need it more than the extremities do. In the end, using alcohol to speed up the blood flow simply speeds up the body's overall loss of heat.

This being so, says the Medical Journal of Australia, it is time to stop telling children about the famous dogs of the hospice of St. Bernard. "If it is true that each dog carried a flask of brandy,"*says the Journal sternly, "then it may be said at once and with emphasis that no worse treatment of the chilled mountain wayfarer could be devised—far better today would be a Thermos of hot milk . . . In rescue work, whether in shipwreck or in exposure to cold on land, alcohol should be avoided as a veritable poison. If the rescued persons are brought into a hot room or given a warm bath, some justification for a modest dose of alcohol might be advanced, but certainly not before. Many a life has been needlessly thrown away through the belief that alcohol gives the body heat."

Physicians themselves are partly to blame for the public's ignorance, the Journal complains, because some of them like to take a nip in cold weather. The ironic truth: alcohol may really do more good in the tropics, by dilating blood vessels and helping the body to get rid of excess heat.