Grappling with the Monster; Or, the Curse and the Cure of Strong DrinkArthur, T. S. (Timothy Shay)
Religion
Grappling with the Monster; Or, the Curse and the Cure of Strong Drink
Arthur, T. S. (Timothy Shay)
Temperance
"We have observed that in many instances the fact of the patient being
convinced that he is an hereditary inebriate, has produced beneficial
results. Summoning to his aid all the latent counterbalancing energies
which he has at command, and clothing himself with this armor, he goes
forth to war, throws up the fortifications of physical and mental
restraint, repairs the breaches and inroads of diseased appetite,
regains control of the citadel of the brain, and then, with shouts of
triumph, he unfurls the banner of 'VICTORY!'"
Dr. Wood, of London, in his work on insanity, speaking on the subject of
hereditary inebriety, says:
"Instances are sufficiently familiar, and several have occurred within
my own personal knowledge, where the father, having died at any early
age from the effects of intemperance, has left a son to be brought up by
those who have severely suffered from his excesses, and have therefore
the strongest motives to prevent, if possible, a repetition of such
misery; every pain has been taken to enforce sobriety, and yet,
notwithstanding all precautions, the habits of the father have become
those of the son, who, never having seen him from infancy, could not
have adopted them from imitation. Everything was done to encourage
habits of temperance, but all to no purpose; the seeds of the disease
had begun to germinate; a blind impulse led the doomed individual, by
successive and rapid strides, along the same course which was fatal to
the father, and which, ere long, terminated in his own destruction."
How great and fearful the power of an appetite which cannot only enslave
and curse the man over which it gains control, but send its malign
influence down to the second and third and fourth generations,
sometimes to the absolute
EXTINGUISHMENT OF FAMILIES!
Morel, a Frenchman, gives the following as the result of his observation
of the hereditary effects of drunkenness:
"_First generation_: Immorality, depravity, excess in the use of
alcoholic liquors, moral debasement. _Second generation_: Hereditary
drunkenness, paroxysms of mania, general paralysis. _Third generation_:
Sobriety, hypochondria, melancholy, systematic ideas of being
persecuted, homicidal tendencies. _Fourth generation_: Intelligence
slightly developed, first accessions of mania at sixteen years of age,
stupidity, subsequent idiocy and probable extinction of family."
Dr. T.D. Crothers, in an analysis of the hundred cases of inebriety
received at the New York Inebriate Asylum, gives this result: "Inebriety
inherited direct from parents was traced in twenty-one cases. In eleven
of these the father drank alone, in six instances the mother drank, and
in four cases both parents drank.
"In thirty-three cases inebriety was traced to ancestors more remote, as
grandfather, grandmother, etc., etc., the collateral branches exhibiting
both inebriety and insanity. In some instances a whole generation had
been passed over, and the disorders of the grandparents appeared again.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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