Medicine: Le Gros Rouge

Frenchmen are drinking themselves to death at a faster rate than ever. Dr. Guy Godlewski, a Paris hormone specialist, told the French Academy of Medicine last week that after wartime’s austerity, the number of deaths from cirrhosis of the liver quadrupled from 1947 to 1950, tripled again by 1956. The peak total that year: 20,279 deaths from alcoholism, 14-176 of them from cirrhosis. Cause of the trouble is not hard liquor, said Dr. Godlewski, which most Frenchmen use sparingly, but ordinary red wine, or le gros rouge. Alcoholism is not the only contributing cause of cirrhosis, and may not lead to it at all if the rest of the diet is properly balanced. But the cause-and-effect relationship in France is so clear and so common that he calls cirrhosis of the liver la maladie du gros rouge. The vast majority of 8,000 victims studied had drunk two to three quarts of the stuff every day.