While the absolute inheritance of a craving for alcohol is, in my experience, a rare thing--so rare as to seem almost negligible, there is no doubt, on the other hand, that many men and women inherit imperfect nervous systems. An imperfect nervous system, if it knew the reason for its own imperfections, might naturally crave alcohol; but inasmuch as such an imperfect system is not naturally accompanied by this instinctive knowledge, the theory of hereditary alcoholic craving must be set aside as untenable. I absolutely deny, therefore, the possibility of such hereditary tendencies. I know that by so doing I may cause acute mental discomfort to those who have made of heredity an excuse for their errors not only to their friends, but in their own minds. The old cloak of heredity has been worn to tatters and must be discarded. Who among us cannot follow up the branches of his family-tree and find somewhere upon one side or the other a person of alcoholic tendencies? In ninety families out of a hundred any one who looks can find such an excuse for his own weakness. In thousands of instances physicians have taken seriously such excuses offered by their patients, but the doctor who listens to his patient's babble of heredity is sure to be misled, and the patient who believes this too commonly accepted theory robs himself of his strongest weapon against alcohol--his own conviction of his personal responsibility and power for self-help. ALCOHOLISM AS A DISEASE We hear much sympathetic talk of the "disease of alcoholism." This is only in a sense true. It is not a case of helpless chance, for the difficulty has been manufactured and developed by man himself. The alcoholic, mentally weakened by the reaction of the stimulant, is of all people most likely to exhibit that most striking evidence of weakness--a craving for sympathy rather than for blame. Habitual alcoholics continually plead for sympathy with mothers, fathers, wives, and friends; and too often they are granted not only pity, but, what is worse, toleration. The sanatorium promoters and proprietors of fake cures continually harp on alcoholism as a disease; and even a few scientists, who should know better, have been misled into an acceptance of this theory. Doctors should be the first to knock from under their patients the psychologically harmful props of the heredity theories.