Health, Happiness, and Longevity: Health without medicine: happiness without money: the result, longevityMcCarty, Louis Philippe
Science
Health, Happiness, and Longevity: Health without medicine: happiness without money: the result, longevity
McCarty, Louis Philippe
Hygiene
An English investigation, just completed, puts in tangible form the
effect of the use of alcohol, from observations covering 4,234 cases in
all walks of life. This report shows that, with men over twenty-five,
the intemperate use of alcohol cuts off ten years from life, those who
never drink to excess, or use no liquor, living, on the average, ten
years longer than those who do. Indulgence, if carried to excess,
doubles diseases of the liver, quadruples those of the kidneys, and
greatly increases the number of deaths from pneumonia, pleurisy, and
epilepsy.
It is not often appreciated how many people die annually from the
effects of strong drink. Dr. Norman Kerr, an eminent physician of
England, believing the statement of temperance people to be extravagant,
that 60,000 people die annually from the effects of strong drink, began
as early as 1870 a personal inquiry, in connection with several medical
men and experts, expecting to quickly disprove the same. According to
their deductions, the latest estimates of deaths of adults annually
caused through intemperance is, in Great Britain, 120,000; in France,
142,000; in the United States, 80,000--or nearly a half million each
year in three countries aggregating a population of 112,000,000.
_Excessive Beer Drinking._--In the earlier part of our work we
endeavored to impress on our readers the necessity of regularity and the
avoidance of excesses. The last week of 1889 in New York City saw two
prominent brewers buried, and two others of the guild were near death.
None of them were, or are, over forty-seven years old. Kidney and heart
disease were the causes of death in the case of the first two. Similar
ailments have marked the other two gentlemen for the grave. The question
arises, Was it beer or champagne that caused these diseases? In this
connection the statement a physician of Bellevue Hospital once made is
not amiss. These are his words: "The worst cases of alcoholic ailments
coming under our observation are those resulting from excessive beer
drinking."
In appearance the beer drinker may be the picture of health; but in
reality he is most incapable of resisting disease. A slight injury, a
severe cold, or a shock to the body or mind, will commonly provoke
acute disease, ending fatally. Compared with other inebriates who use
different kinds of alcohol, he is more incurable and more generally
diseased. It is our observation that beer drinking in this country
produces the very lowest kind of inebriety, closely allied to criminal
insanity. The most dangerous class of ruffians in our large cities are
beer drinkers. Intellectually, a stupor amounting almost to paralysis
arrests the reason, changing all the higher faculties into a mere
animalism, sensual, selfish, sluggish, varied only with paroxysms of
anger, senseless and brutal.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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