directly, it can cause such impaired digestion of foods in the
stomach and intestine, and such impaired activity of the glands,
especially the liver, that toxins from imperfect digestion and from
waste products are more readily produced and absorbed, and these are
believed by some directly or indirectly to cause cardiovascular-
renal disease. Hence alcohol is an important factor in causing the
death of persons from 40 to 50 years of age.

The question of whether or not a person smokes too much, and what
constitutes oversmoking, will soon be asked on all insurance blanks.
As tobacco almost invariably raises the blood pressure, and when the
blood pressure again falls there is again a craving in the man for
the narcotic, it must be a factor in producing, later in life,
cardiovascular-renal disease. Hence an increased systolic blood
pressure must be in part interpreted by the amount of tobacco that
the person uses. BLOOD PRESSURE AND PREGNANCY Evans [Footnote:
Evans: Month. Cyc. and Med. Bull., November, 1912, p. 649.] of
Montreal studied thirty-eight pregnant women who had eclampsia,
albuminuria and toxic vomiting, and found the systolic pressures to
vary from 200 to 140 mm. He did not find that the highest pressures
necessarily showed the greatest insufficiency of the kidneys, but
that the blood pressure must be considered in conjunction with other
toxic symptoms. In thirty-two cases he was compelled to induce labor
when the blood pressure was 150 mm. or under, while in four cases
with a blood pressure over 150 mm., the toxic symptoms were so
slight that the patients were allowed to go to term and had natural
deliveries.

A rising blood pressure in pregnancy, when associated with other
toxic symptoms, is indicative of danger, and Evans believes that a