A Quart a Day

At Bordeaux University, 70 prominent French doctors gathered last week to discuss the effects of wine on the human body. Inevitably, the conclusions were favorable to wine. The experts, calling themselves the "Doctor Friends of French Wines," banded together in the early 1930s to blow away a whiff of prohibition sentiment which wafted over France.

Chosen to keynote last week's meeting was a fashionable Paris doctor, ruddy-cheeked Raymond J. Weissenbach. He took the scientific approach:

"Wine," said he, "contains and carries to the human organism ... a complex of mineral materials (calcium salts, potassium, iron, sodium and many more), of organic materials (alcohols, sugar, glycerine, organic acids, tannin, ether, alde-hydes), of vitamins, and diverse mineral substances. Because of these different things wine, for a healthy man who makes habitual use of it, excites the appetite, stimulates the motor and secretive functions . . . and helps the whole digestion ... It favors general nutrition and the stability of a man's humor."

But Dr. Weissenbach, frankly partisan, denounced the aperitif or cocktail. Said he: "All drinks containing alcohol, even wine, taken before eating are poison." The proper dosage of wine to be taken with meals, he suggested, was about a pint a day for the intellectual worker, a quart for a factory worker, 1 1/2 quarts for a man doing physical work out of doors.

Professor Louis Tanon of Paris raised the only objection: the recommended dosage, he asserted, was only half enough. The Doctor Friends set up a commission to look into that.

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