Nearly twelve years have now elapsed since Dr. Day began to accumulate
experience in the treatment of inebriates, during which time he has had
nearly four thousand patients under his care. What proportion of these
were permanently cured it is impossible to say, because nothing is
heard of many patients after they leave; but it is reasonably
conjectured that two thirds of the whole number were restored. It is a
custom with many of them to write an annual letter to Dr. Day on the
anniversary of their entering the Home under his management, and the
reading of such letters is a highly interesting and beneficial feature
of the Wednesday evening temperance meetings. The alcoholic mania is no
respecter of persons. Dr. Day has had under treatment twenty-one
clergymen, one of whom was a Catholic priest (who had delirium
tremens), and one a Jewish Rabbi. He has had one old man past seventy,
and one boy of sixteen. He has had a Philadelphia "killer" and a judge
of a supreme court. He has had steady two-quarts-a-day men, and men who
were subject only to semiannual debauches. He has had men whose "tears"
lasted but forty-eight hours, and one man who came in of his own accord
after what he styled "a general spree" of three months' continuance. He
has had drunkards of two years' standing, and those who have been
slaves of strong drink for thirty years.
Some of his successes have been striking and memorable. There was Dr.
X---- of Tennessee, at thirty-five a physician of large practice,
professor in a medical college, happy in an excellent wife and seven
children. Falling into drink, he lost at length his practice, his
professorship, his property, his home; his family abandoned him to his
fate, and went to his wife's father's in another State; and he became
at last a helpless gutter sot. His brother, who heard by chance of the
Home in Boston, picked him up one day from the street, where he lay
insensible, and got him upon the train for the East. Before he roused
from his drunken stupor, he was half-way across Virginia. "Where am I?"
he asked. "In Virginia, on your way to Boston." "All right," said he,
in a drunkard's drunkenest manner,--"all right! give me some whiskey."
He was carried into the Home in the arms of men, and lay for some weeks
miserably sick. His health improved, and the _man_ revived. He clutched
at this unexpected chance of escape, and co-operated with all his heart
with the system. Dr. Day wrote a hopeful letter to his wife. "Speak not
to me of a husband," she replied; "I have no husband; I buried my
husband long ago." After four months' stay in the institution, the
patient returned home, and resumed his practice. A year after, his
family rejoined him. He recovered all his former standing, which to
this day, after nine years of sobriety, he retains. His ninth annual
letter to his deliverer I have read. "By the way," he says in a
postscript, "did you receive my letters each year of the war?" Yes,
they reached Dr.
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