Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why: What Medical Writers SayAllen, Martha Meir
Science
Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why: What Medical Writers Say
Allen, Martha Meir
Alcohol -- Physiological effect; Temperance
Dr. Greene, of Boston, when addressing his brethren and sisters of the
medical association in that city, upon alcohol, said in closing:--
"It needs no argument to convince you that it is upon the
medical profession, to a very great extent, that the rum-seller
depends to maintain the respectability of the traffic. It
requires only your own experience, and observations, to convince
you that it is upon the medical profession, upon their
prescriptions and recommendations for its use upon many
occasions, that the habitual dram-drinker depends for the
seeming respectability of his drinking habits. It is upon the
members of the medical profession, and the exceptional laws
which it has always demanded, that the whole liquor fraternity
depends, more than upon anything else, to screen it from
opprobrium, and just punishment for the evils which the traffic
entails upon society; and it is because the rum-seller, and the
rum-drinker, hide under this cloak of seeming respectability
that they are so difficult to reach either by moral suasion, or
by law. Physicians generally have only to overcome the force of
habit, and the prevailing fashion in medicine, to find an
excellent way, when they will all look back with wonder and
surprise, that they, as individuals, and members of an honored
profession, should have been so far compromised."
"It will be asked, _Was there no evidence of any good service
rendered by the agent in the midst of so much obvious bad
service?_ I answer to that question THAT THERE WAS NO SUCH
EVIDENCE WHATEVER, AND IS NONE."--SIR B. W. RICHARDSON.
"A prominent general practitioner expressed surprise that any
one could do without alcohol in general medicine. He was
persuaded to make a trial, by abandoning the internal use of
spirits as medicine. A year afterward he wrote that his success
in the treatment of disease had been equal to that of any year
in the past, and that his cases recovered as well without
alcohol as with it. In a recent medical meeting he remarked, 'I
thought for many years that I could not do without spirits as
medicine. I was mistaken. I am constantly treating cases of all
degrees of severity without alcohol, and my success is fully
equal to the average.'"--_Quarterly of A. M. T. A._
"Happily, the belief in alcohol is passing away."--DR. C. R.
FRANCIS, late Professor of Medicine, Calcutta Medical College.
Dr. Moor, the distinguished editor of the _Pacific Record_, says:--
"While the use of alcohol is always injudicious and injurious,
it is particularly so in summer, when the system is predisposed
to disturbances of the gastro-intestinal tract.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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