Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners: A Complete Sexual Science and a Guide to Purity and Physical Manhood, Advice To Maiden, Wife, And Mother, Love, Courtship, And MarriageJefferis, B. G. (Benjamin Grant)
Science
Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners: A Complete Sexual Science and a Guide to Purity and Physical Manhood, Advice To Maiden, Wife, And Mother, Love, Courtship, And Marriage
Jefferis, B. G. (Benjamin Grant)
Marriage; Medicine, Popular; Sexual ethics
12. THE ACCIDENTAL OR SOCIAL DRUNKARD is yet on safe ground. He has not
acquired the dangerous craving for liquor. It is only on special occasions
that he yields to excessive indulgence; sometimes in meeting a friend, or
at some political blow-out. On extreme occasions he will indulge until he
becomes a helpless victim, and usually as he grows older occasions will
increase, and step by step he will be lead nearer to the precipice of ruin.
13. THE PERIODICAL OR SPASMODIC DRUNKARD, with whom it is always the
unexpected which occurs, and who at intervals exacts from his accumulated
capital the usury of as prolonged a spree as his nerves and stomach will
stand. Science is inclined to charitably label this specimen of man a sort
of a physiologic puzzle, to be as much pitied as blamed. Given the benefit
of every doubt, when he starts off on one of his hilarious tangents, he
becomes a howling nuisance; if he has a family, keeps them continually on
the ragged edge of apprehension, and is unanimously pronounced a "holy
terror" by his friends. His life and future is an uncertainty. He is
unreliable and cannot be long trusted. Total reformation is the only hope,
but it rarely is accomplished.
14. THE SOT.--A blunt term that needs no defining, for even the children
comprehend the hopeless degradation it implies. Laws to restrain and punish
him are framed; societies to protect and reform him are organized, and
mostly in vain. He is prone in life's very gutter; bloated, reeking and
polluted with the doggery's slops and filth. He can fall but a few feet
lower, and not until he stumbles into an unmarked, unhonored grave, where
kind mother earth and the merciful mantle of oblivion will cover and
conceal the awful wreck he made of God's own image. To the casual observer,
the large majority of the community, these three phases, at whose vagaries
many laugh, and over whose consequences millions mourn, comprehend
intoxication and its results, from the filling of the cup to its shattering
fall from the nerveless hand, and this is the end of the matter. Would to
God that it were! for at that it would be bad enough. But it is not, for
wife, children and friends must suffer and drink the cup of trouble and
sorrow to its dregs.
* * * * *
{445}
OBJECT LESSONS OF THE EFFECTS OF ALCOHOL AND CIGARETTE SMOKING.
By PROF. GEORGE HENKLE, who personally made the postmortem examinations and
drew the following illustrations from the diseased organs just as they
appeared when first taken from the bodies of the unfortunate victims.
[Illustration: THE STOMACH of an habitual drinker of alcoholic stimulants,
showing the ulcerated condition of the mucous membrane, incapacitating this
important organ for digestive functions.]
[Illustration: THE STOMACH (interior view) of a healthy person with the
first section of the small intestines.]
{446}
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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