Is Hypothermic Alcohol Consumption Death Common?
I’d imagine the character froze to death and was too drunk to notice. In my understanding of it, freezing to death is a relatively calm way of dying, sort of like passing out and not waking up. I could see how a person could get very drunk, pass out, and die from exposure without much struggle. Or, what mdn said.
Basically, alcohol dilates the peripheral blood vessels, so you feel warm (thanks to the extra blood flowing to your extremities) but are actually cooling your core body. Once you get too cold… See here, for a few comments on the subject.
I’ve read in arctic explorer books and the like (can’t remember any titles) that one can die drinking hard liquor in extreme cold because alcohol’s freezing point is far lower than water’s, resulting in ingest a big dollop of -30-degree liquid in such a way that trauma results to the system and immediate death ensues. There’s no source that I can cite, and I may have read it in a work of fiction, but it seems reasonable to me. Take this comment as a wild-assed guess and not an authoritative response.
Alcohol has a lower freezing point than water. So pure alcohol can be very very cold and still liquid. It’s claimed that the same sort of deaths occurred in Siberia: Russians would drink straight vodka that had reached absurdly low temperatures but was still liquid, the cold liquid would hit their stomachs, and bring their core body temperatures down low enough, quickly enough to kill them outright. Whether these claims are true, I don’t know (they may be but probably are not from <>The Gulag Archipelago), but I imagine Boyle may have heard these same stories.
