These men were always awkward persons to treat; their flesh healed badly, and they were liable to many complications which abstemious persons would escape. Many artisans, whose weekly wages would average twenty-eight to thirty shillings, owned to spending ten shillings on their own liquor—a sum which, given to their wives, would have often made all the difference between poverty and decent comfort. Many of the accidents that were brought in could be traced to unsteadiness of brain caused by alcohol. When men are working in dangerous situations, it is perilous in the extreme for them to indulge in stimulants. It was not surprising that men who drank two gallons of strong beer a day should fall into the vats or down trap-doors; the wonder was they could walk at all. One man confessed to having taken on an average forty two-pennyworths of rum a day. He was a Jew dealer in metals, and made a good deal of money at times; but his liver could not stand the alcohol, and he was the subject of a good pathological address on cirrhosis when he died. This drink-madness was often found to be hereditary, as were many other maladies. Very often the taking of the family history involved the collection of very curious facts from the patients’ relatives when they came to visit their sick friends. Idiosyncrasies were often traced several generations back, odd deformities and bodily peculiarities persisted in families as explained by Darwin, and illustrated the fact that a man thinks and reasons in certain grooves wherein have run the wheels of thought of hosts of his ancestors. A descendant of a Huguenot refugee remarked lately that his nerves had not yet got rid of the terror infused into them by the hair-breadth escapes his progenitors endured hundreds of years ago. It is said the whole world feels the effect of the stamp of one’s foot on the ground; not less is it true that our habits and work will influence the minds of untold generations of our successors.