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
No test more exacting than the one made at Bellevue Hospital could be
devised. Most of the cases appearing for treatment in the wards of that
institution are of the most advanced type, for the nature of the New York
hospital system may be said in a general way to select for Bellevue the
least hopeful patients coming from the least hopeful classes of society.
If, therefore, anything approaching permanent relief was secured for as
many as twenty out of every one hundred cases, an extraordinary efficiency
was indicated.
Of course the intelligent reader will understand that no man with reason
can claim for any treatment the power permanently to divorce from alcohol
a man who does not wish to be divorced from it. To take a man whose system
has reached that degree of craving for alcohol that he would sign away his
right to salvation in exchange for a drink after a brief period of
deprivation, if he could not otherwise obtain the alcohol, and to unpoison
him so that he feels no necessity or even the slightest desire for a drink
or for any stimulant, is to accomplish a great deal of good. It means
that his nervous system has been restored to something nearly normal, and
that he has been given a chance. The man who has not had this help from
outside can do nothing for himself; but having been cleared of alcoholic
poison, he is brought into a mental state wherein he finds it possible to
estimate reasonably the harm which alcohol has done him. The patient is
then in a mental state that enables his relatives and friends to deal with
him without being forced to estimate and allow for alcoholic abnormalities
in his processes of thought. He is in a physical state that, although it
apparently may be worse than that in which the alcohol had placed him, is
nevertheless one that will enable his physician to work with him
intelligently.
Such an achievement seems a perfect piece of medical work of its kind.
Properly carried out, my treatment will accomplish exactly this in every
instance. It will accomplish it within five days and very likely within
three days. I have never known it to require a period of more than seven.
When this treatment is properly provided for throughout the country, it
will be found that neither large nor costly institutions will be
necessary. The stay of every patient is so brief that in the average
community a small institution containing only a few beds will be found
sufficiently large to meet all local needs.
THE HABITUAL DRUNKARD IS NOT A CRIMINAL
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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