Habits that Handicap: The Menace of Opium, Alcohol, and Tobacco, and the RemedyTowns, Charles Barnes
Science
Habits that Handicap: The Menace of Opium, Alcohol, and Tobacco, and the Remedy
Towns, Charles Barnes
Alcoholism; Opium abuse -- United States; Tobacco use
This, then, is at present the treatment accorded by the public to the
victims of this serious disease. There are no clinics devoted to the study
of alcoholism, although it is the ailment of probably one third of the
sick people in the world to-day. Those who feel disposed to question this
statement will be convinced that it is reasonable if they but make a count
of the private sanatoriums dealing exclusively with alcoholics in and near
New York, and, indeed, dotting and surrounding all our large cities.
Connecticut, New Jersey, and Illinois will show a startling number. And it
must also be remembered that many of the cases of disease other than
inebriety treated in all public hospitals have histories more or less
alcoholic, and that the insane asylums are crowded with those gone mad
through drink. It is the demand of common sense, not of sentiment alone,
that this situation should be altered.
Provision never has been made really to help even the man who, having lost
control, is anxious to regain it. Inquire of the United Charities in New
York and of similar organizations in other cities, and you will learn that
they are doing most intelligent work in the treatment of tuberculosis, but
that alcoholism is getting only condemnation and punishment, not curative
methods; yet there probably are forty alcoholics to every consumptive.
Neglect is almost universal, and where that charge cannot be brought,
there the errors are incredible and continual. Many are charitable toward
the drunkard, giving him their dimes when he begs for them, and thus
promoting his inebriety; but society as a whole ignores him until he
forces its attention through his helplessness or often through some sin,
which might be more rightly charged to alcohol rather than to any natural
criminal tendency in the man's nature.
ALCOHOLICS SHOULD BE TREATED AS INVALIDS
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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