# Alcohol, a Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine/Chapter 15

CHAPTER XV.
TESTIMONIES OF PHYSICIANS AGAINST ALCOHOLIC MEDICATION.
"In abandoning the use of alcohol it should be clearly understood that we abandon an injurious influence, and escape from a source of disease, as we do when we get into a purer atmosphere. There is not the slightest occasion to do anything, or to take anything to make up for the loss of a strengthening or supporting agent. No loss has been incurred save the loss of a cause of disease and death."—Dr. J. J. Ridge, of London Temperance Hospital.
Sir. B. W. Richardson, M. D., said of the London Temperance Hospital:—
"No alcohol is administered, and no substitute for it. Any drug with similar action would be bad; warmth and suitable nourishment are relied on to keep up the system. We know that people who take alcohol often feel better; this is from the narcotic action. The pain may be stilled, and the disease forgotten, but it has not been removed; its symptom has been narcotized."
Another writer says:—
"I am asked for a substitute for brandy, and frankly and gladly I tell you there is no substitute, for I have no knowledge of any agent equally pleasing to the palate, and yet so destructive of life."
​Dr. Norman Kerr, President of the Society for the Study of Inebriety, England, says :—
"My own experience of thirty-four years in the practice of my profession has taught me that in nearly all cases and kinds of disease the medical use of alcohol is unnecessary, and in a large number of instances is prejudicial and even dangerous. Having given an intoxicant, in strictly definite and guarded doses, probably on the whole only about once in 3,000 cases (then usually when nothing else was available in an emergency), and having had most varieties of disease to contend with, my death-rate and duration of illness have been quite as low as my neighbors. The experience of the London Temperance Hospital and other similar institutions, the current reports of that hospital being now reliable scientific records, amply support this experience.
"The chief peril of narcotic drugs has always appeared to me to lie in their disguising the real state of the patient from himself as well as from his doctor and his friends. If there is any serious ailment, such as cholera or fever, the sufferer may seem to be and may feel better. He is not better. He is actually worse made—worse by the alcohol, and not unseldom, after the evanescent alcoholic disguise and deceptive improvement has faded, it is found that the malady itself has been progressing, unseen and unsuspected from the delusive aspect of the alcohol, steadily toward a fatal termination, which might, in many cases, have been averted but for the true state of the patient having been completely masked.
"Wherever the blame really has lain, one thing is now clear, that alcoholic intoxicants are very rarely useful as a medicine; are at the best dangerous remedies; and that, other things being equal, the less they are resorted to the better for the chances of the patient's recovery, the better for body and brain, the better for physical, intellectual and moral well-being. Alcohol does not nourish, but pulls down; does not stimulate, but ​depresses; does not strengthen, but excites and exhausts. Alcohol is the pathological fraud of frauds, degenerating while it claims to be reconstructing, enfeebling while it appears to be invigorating, destroying vitality while it professes to infuse new life."
A medical writer in the Toledo, O., Blade holds up in clear light the relation of the materia medica. and alcohol, and the opportunity of the physician to become a benefactor, and active temperance worker. His remarks follow :—
"One of the signs of the times in the temperance movement is the steady growth among physicians of a sentiment against the administration of liquor of any kind as a medicine. The accepted scientific view of alcohol is that it is a poison, and its administration should be as guarded as that of any other poison used as a medicine. Perhaps the hardest thing a physician finds in his effort to restore his patients to health without the use of liquors is the common, but erroneous, belief that they are 'strengthening,' and that the convalescent, by their use, reaches recovery more quickly. The error is in supposing that any alcoholic liquor is nourishing, or strengthening. They are neither. Alcohol does not nourish, but it pulls down; it does not strengthen, but excites and exhausts, for every stimulation is necessarily followed by a period of depression, and this is inevitably unfavorable to the patient.
"There is a grave responsibility resting on the physician who prescribes alcoholic liquor. It may arouse in a susceptible patient a dormant, inherited tendency to drink. He may, by authorizing its use during the period of convalescence, fix a habit upon a patient of feeble will, which the latter will never be able to shake off. No physician who realizes this great moral responsibility will be willing to accept it habitually. He certainly knows that the best medical authorities agree that alcoholic intoxicants are rarely useful as a medicine; that at ​best they are dangerous remedies, and that the less they are resorted to, the better for both brain and body.
"In point of fact the physician who does his duty to his patient teaches him the error of the prevalent belief in the virtues of liquor in restoring the sick to health. He becomes an active temperance worker in effect. And he can do a noble and useful work in the rescue of those who are under the control of the drink habit. *****
"Furthermore, every physician owes it to his profession to teach his patients the utter fallacy of the common belief that alcohol is an article of food value. It has no such value. The use of intoxicants in any quantity whatever, or at any time, is entirely useless and unnecessary. The continued use of them gradually induces structural degradations and functional derangements of the great bodily organs, thus leading to the gravest physical disorders."
"I have demonstrated by actual experience that no form of alcoholic drink is necessary, or desirable, for internal use, either in health, or any of the varied forms of disease; but that health can be better preserved, and disease more successfully treated, without the use of such drinks.* * * * * Simple truth compels me to say that I have never yet seen a case in which the use of alcoholic drinks either increased the force of the heart's action, or strengthened the patient. But I could detail very many cases in which the administration of alcoholics was quieting the patient's restlessness, enfeebling the capillary circulation, and steadily favoring increased engorgement of the lungs and other internal viscera, and thereby hastening a fatal result, where both attending physician and friends thought they were the only agents that were keeping the patient alive.
"I have found no case of disease and no emergency arising from accident, that I could not treat more successfully without any form of fermented or distilled liquors than with. It is easy to see that the anæsthetic properties of alcohol can be made available by an intelligent and skillful physician to meet a very ​limited number of indications in the treatment of some cases that will come before him. But the same intelligence and skill will enable him to select other remedies capable of meeting the same indications more perfectly, and, with less tendency to secondary bad effects. I have no hesitation, therefore, in stating that for the attainment of the highest degree of success in the management of all forms of disease, whether acute or chronic, we need no form of fermented, or distilled, alcoholic drinks. And whoever will boldly make the trial, will find that his patients, of every kind, will make better progress, on good air and simple nourishment, without any admixture of alcoholic liquids, than they will with such addition. In other words he will find that the supposed benefits of this class of agents in medicine, are as illusory as they are in general society, and that the words of the wise man are worthy of careful consideration when he says: ‘Wine is a mocker and strong drink is raging, and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise.’ ”—Dr. N. S. Davis, Chicago, Ill.
Dr. Greene, of Boston, when addressing his brethren and sisters of the medical association in that city, upon alcohol, said in closing:—
“It needs no argument to convince you that it is upon the medical profession, to a very great extent, that the rum-seller depends to maintain the respectability of the traffic. It requires only your own experience, and observations, to convince ​you that it is upon the medical profession, upon their prescriptions and recommendations for its use upon many occasions, that the habitual dram-drinker depends for the seeming respectability of his drinking habits. It is upon the members of the medical profession, and the exceptional laws which it has always demanded, that the whole liquor fraternity depends, more than upon anything else, to screen it from opprobium, and just punishment for the evils which the traffic entails upon society; and it is because the rum-seller, and the rum-drinker, hide under this cloak of seeming respectability that they are so difficult to reach either by moral suasion, or by law. Physicians generally have only to overcome the force of habit, and the prevailing fashion in medicine, to find an excellent way, when they will all look back with wonder and surprise, that they, as individuals, and members of an honored profession, should have been so far compromised.”
“It will be asked. Was there no evidence of any good service rendered by the agent in the midst of so much obvious bad service? I answer to that question that there was no such evidence whatever, and is none.”—Sir B. W. Richardson.
“A prominent general practitioner expressed surprise that any one could do without alcohol in general medicine. He was persuaded to make a trial, by abandoning the internal use of spirits as medicine. A year afterward he wrote that his success in the treatment of disease had been equal to that of any year in the past, and that his cases recovered as well without alcohol as with it. In a recent medical meeting he remarked, ‘I thought for many years that I could not do without spirits as medicine. I was mistaken. I am constantly treating cases of all degrees of severity without alcohol, and my success is fully equal to the average.’ ”—Quarterly of A. M. T. A.
​Dr. Moor, the distinguished editor of the Pacific Record, says:—
“While the use of alcohol is always injudicious and injurious, it is particularly so in summer, when the system is predisposed to disturbances of the gastro-intestinal tract.
“Alcohol flushes the capillaries of the mucous membranes just as it does the capillaries of the skin, and where there is already a smouldering congestion, it will take but little to light the fire of acute inflammation, which will rage with greatly increased intensity.
“It is wiser to habitually avoid even the medicinal use of alcohol, as there are plenty of other stimulants which will give the desired results without entailing any disastrous after effects.”
“All the pleasant sensations of increased mental and physical power, which the use of alcohol produces, are deceptive and arise from the paralysis of the judgment and the momentary benumbing of the sense of fatigue which afterwards returns so imperiously with perhaps even greater intensity.”—Prof. Adolf Pick, of Wurzburg.
Dr. Frank Payne, vice-president of the London Pathological Society, says:—
“Alcohol is a functional and tissue poison, and there is no proper or necessary use for it as a medicine.”
“When I first heard that there was going to be a total abstinence hospital, I thought it would be a complete failure. That was because I had been taught as a student to regard alcohol as absolutely necessary in the treatment of disease. Nevertheless I was an abstainer myself. When I was asked to join as physician, I did not consent without a good deal of consideration, and then only on the understanding that if I thought a person needed it, I should be allowed to administer alcohol. I remember the first case of severe typhoid fever I had. He was hovering between life and death, and I was anxiously watching to see ​whether it would be necessary to give alcohol, but the man made a good recovery without it. After watching many cases to whom I should have given alcohol if I had been treating them elsewhere, I came to the conclusion that I had been completely deluded. I gave it at one time to a woman in the Hospital who was in a dying condition, but it did not save her. I do not think I am likely to administer alcohol again. We have had progress and efficiency in the Hospital. It has been like an experiment for the profession, and our success shows that this giving of alcohol is certainly a matter for re-consideration for the medical profession. I believe that they are mistaken. There is no doubt that the amount of alcohol used in other hospitals has diminished greatly, compared with what was used in the past. To the outside public also this Hospital is an example. I believe that an immense number of the public have been teetotalers some time in their lives, but a great many of them have gone back to the drink in time of illness, because they have been advised to do so. This Hospital is a standing witness that disease and surgical injuries can be treated without alcoholic liquors.”—De. J. J. Ridge, of London Temperance Hospital.
“I find very little use for alcohol in the practice of medicine. Where there is one element of good in alcohol there are thousands that are bad.”—Dr. Alfred Mercer, Syracuse, N. Y., Professor of Medicine in Syracuse Medical School.
“Alcohol is rarely necessary. Other remedies are much more efficacious. In my department of the University of Buffalo I follow Cushny, who claims that alcohol is a poison, a depressant in direct proportion to the amount ingested, and a so-called false food.”—Dr. De Witt H. Sherman, Adjunct Professor of Therapeutics, University of Buffalo Medical Department.
“I believe that alcohol is the greatest foe to the human race to-day. I feel that it would not be a serious harm if its use as a medicine were totally discontinued.”—Dr. Walter E. Fernald, Professor in Tufts Medical School, Boston, Mass.
​“I rarely or never prescribe alcohol as a medicament or a food, or sanction its use as a beverage. Physiologically I look upon alcohol as a narcotic, with perhaps a primary stimulating effect, but I believe that such desired action as it is capable of producing can be equally well brought about by other agents. As a beverage the use of alcohol, particularly in excess, is attended with definite and well-known dangers.”—Dr. A. A. Eshner, Professor of Clinical Medicine, Philadelphia Polyclinic and College for Graduates in Medicine.
“I agree with you altogether in your agitation against the use of alcohol in any form. I believe that wine is a mocker, and belief in wine as a benefit, mockery.”—Dr. Mathew Woods, Philadelphia, Pa.
“It is extremely seldom that I ever advise the use of alcohol in any form for my patients.”—Elliot P. Joslin, M. D., Professor in Harvard Medical School, Boston, Mass.
“My belief is that there is very little need of the medical use of alcohol. I almost never use it in my practice, and think that its use by practitioners generally is far less than it was a few years ago.”—Dr. E. G. Cutler, Professor in Harvard Medical School, Boston, Mass.
“I believe that the trend of teaching in the Harvard Medical School has been growing less favorable, of late years, to the use of alcohol in the treatment of disease, and in fact it is far less used than it was a generation ago.”—Dr. James J. Putnam, Professor in Harvard Medical School.
“My personal opinion in regard to the use of alcoholic drinks is very decidedly averse to such use. I have long been of the opinion that while the use of alcohol may restrain tissue metamorphosis, it cannot legitimately be considered a food.”—Dr. William O. Stillman, Albany Medical College, Albany, N. Y.
“I do not think you will meet with very many physicians who favor alcohol and its use. I believe the trend of the teaching in the Albany Medical College is that alcohol is not a food or stimulant.”—Dr. A. Vander Veer, Albany, N. Y., Medical School.
​"I think the medical profession could get along perfectly well without the use of alcohol, except as it is needed in the manufacture of drugs. As a therapeutic agent, ft has very little value. I do not suppose I have used a pint of alcohol in the last ten years. I think the tendency of the medical profession throughout, the country is to give up alcohol in the treatment of disease.”—Dr. Matthew D. Mann, Dean of the Medical Department of the University of Buffalo, N. Y.
“I very seldom prescribe alcohol as a medicine, and think its effects are positively harmful in the vast majority of medical cases.”—Dr. Allen A. Jones, Adjunct Professor of Medicine, Buffalo, N. Y.
“At the Baptist Hospital I have not ordered alcohol for a patient in several years. At the Massachusetts General Hospital, in the out-patient department, I never prescribe it.”—Dr. Richard Badger, of Harvard Medical School, Boston.
“Alcohol is used much too freely in the treatment of the sick, especially in such conditions as mild typhoid fever, neurasthenia and early tuberculosis. It should be prescribed only when there is definite indication for it, and then in definite dose for a limited period in the same manner as any other powerful and potentially harmful drug.”—Dr. S. S. Cohen, Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia.
“It is seldom necessary to prescribe alcohol as a medicine.”—Dr. James B. Herrick, Professor of Medicine in Rush Medical College, Chicago.
“As I have said but little about the use of medicine in the treatment of typhoid fever, save for one symptom, I may add, for the purpose of definiteness, that I use none except for special symptoms. The rare exceptions are stimulants such as strychnia, in less marked indications coffee. Alcohol as a routine drug I have entirely abandoned, having found that the doses formerly given before or after the bath are altogether unnecessary. Hot milk internally, or hot water bags externally, more than replace spirits according to my experience.”—Dr. George Doek, New Orleans.
​"I have no use for alcohol, either personally, or in my practice. Yet I cannot say that I have entirely abolished it. Alcohol is used in compounding most of our tinctures, but in remedies proper my experience has been that other stimulants, such as ammonia, strychnine, caffeine, kolafra, etc., answer the same purpose without alcohol's dangerous effects. In my practice, which is confined to surgery, I find very, very little use for it. During the past year, in extreme cases, I used it in hypodermic injections, and afterwards felt that ether, or ammonia would have answered the same purpose. I think, in general practice, physicians are dispensing with alcohol more and more, but perhaps unconsciously."—D. W. B. De Garmo, Professor of surgery in Post-Graduate Hospital, New York City.
"Medicine, to-day, would be in a more satisfactory condition if the use of alcohol as a medicine had been interdicted a hundred years ago, and the interdict had remained to the present day. The benefits derived from its use are so small (even when they can be proved, which is much more rarely the case than most people imagine), and the advantages gained are so slight, that they are completely outweighed when we set against them the evil that has been wrought by the abuse of alcohol, and, that has arisen out of the loose methods of prescription that have obtained, and even still obtain, in regard to this drug."—Dr. G. Sims Woodhead, F. R. C. P., F. R. S., Director of the Research Laboratories of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons, London.
"The effect of continually dosing with this drug is too apparent wherever it is used, benumbing the senses, and rendering more difficult every natural function. Alcohol never sustains the powers of life. It sometimes changes the symptoms of disease, but at the expense of the vitality of the body. What is called its supporting action, is a fever induced by the poison, which finally prostrates the patient. The secret of its action is found in the laws of vitality. The man who takes ​alcohol to help digest his food, must first throw off the alcohol, before his stomach can act healthfully.
"There is one encouraging fact to be noted in this connection, that the use of alcohol in medicine has very much diminished during the past twenty-five years, and the present tendency is constantly in that direction. Right here is an important point which I wish to make: When the physician ceases to prescribe alcohol as a medicine, the drink problem will have reached the final stage of its solution. Mankind will eventually learn that safety lies not so much in skillful doctors, or in some wonderful 'new remedy,' as in daily obedience to the laws of health. A small amount of prevention is of more worth than all the power of cure."—Dr. C. H. Shepard, Brooklyn, N. Y.
" My observation has been that there is a decided tendency among educated physicians to give less alcohol than formerly in the treatment of disease. Of late years I have given but very little alcohol in my own practice. The tendency is due, in my opinion, to the study of the physiological action of drugs, and to the better understanding of the causation of disease and pathological processes. Modern investigators now know that we have therapeutic agents that meet the requirements of disease processes with more scientific accuracy than is obtained by the exhibition of alcohol."—Dr. Donnelly, Secretary of Minnesota State Medical Society, St. Paul, Minn.
"Dr. Pearce Gould recently made a speech to the National Temperance League on alcohol and the advantage of doing without it, both in health and in the treatment of disease. It takes a strong man to say the strong things which Mr. Gould said on the subject, especially if he happens to be a medical man. No doubt, as Dr. Gould says, the use of alcohol in medical practice is nothing now compared to what it was twenty years ago, much more forty years ago, when Dr. Todd's influence, and the reaction from the so-called antiphlogistic treatment were at their height. Public opinion has been ​enlightened by the evidence of leaders in medicine, such as Dr. Parkes, Sir William Gull, Dr. Gairdner, Dr. Sanderson, and others, and medical men have dared to treat disease without alcohol, or with only small quantities of it. There are physicians and surgeons of reputation and success, who are so strong in their convictions that alcohol is of little use in the treatment of disease, that it destroys tissues, lessens the resistance to microbes, deranges functions, spoils temper, and shortens life, that they are ready to testify to this effect in public, in company with redoubtable champions of the temperance cause like the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sir William White (chief constructor of the navy), and the Bishop of Derry, who have as much prejudice to contend against in their spheres as the medical man has in his. We recognize with pleasure the good done by such testimony as Dr. Gould's. Men whose record and authority in the profession are such as his have the courage of their opinions, and their honest testimony will be respected even by those who do not go quite so far in discarding alcohol as an element of diet, or as a medicine.—The Lancet, London, May 14, 1898.
"The light of exact investigation has shown that the therapeutic value of alcohol rests on an insecure basis, and it is constantly being made clearer that after all alcohol is a sort of poison to be handled with the same care and circumspection as other agents capable of producing noxious and deadly effect upon the organism. It has been shown by Abbott and others that alcoholic animals are more susceptible to infections than normal animals. And Laitinen, after having studied the influence of alcohol upon infections with anthrax, tubercle and diphtheria bacilli in dogs, rabbits, guinea-pigs and pigeons, reaches the same general results with certainty and directness. Under all circumstances alcohol causes a marked increase in susceptibility no matter whether given before or after infections, no matter whether the doses were few and massive or numerous and small, and no matter ​whether the infection was acute or chronic. The alcoholic animals either die while the controls remain alive, or in case both die, death is earlier in the alcoholic. The facts brought out by the researches of Abbott and Laitinen and others do not furnish the slightest support for the use of alcohol in the treatment of infectious diseases in man."—Journal American Medical Association, Editorial, September 8, 1000.
"Step by step the progress of science has nullified every theory on which the physician administers alcohol. Every position taken has been disapproved. Alcohol is not a food and does not nourish, but impairs nutrition. It is not a stimulant in the proper acceptation of the term; on the contrary it is a depressant. Hence its former universal use in cases of shock was, to say the least, a grave mistake. It has been proved by recent experiments that alcohol retards, perverts, and is destructive either in large or small doses to normal cell growth and development."—Nathan S. Davis, Sr., M. D., former Dean of Northwestern University Medical School, Chicago, Illinois. (Deceased.)
"It seems to me that the field of usefulness of alcohol in therapeutics is extremely limited and possibly does not exist at all. Probably every supposed indication for its use can be met better and more safely by other drugs. The recent work on the so-called food value of alcohol is the subject of much misunderstanding. While it is true that under some circumstances, for example, after a person has acquired a certain degree of tolerance to its poisonous effects, alcohol seems to act as a food in the sense that fats and carbohydrates do, I believe this to be at present a matter of little more than theoretical importance."—Dr. Reid Hunt, Chief of the Department of Pharmacology, Public Health and Marine Hospital Service, Washington, D. C.
"The physician should have blazoned before him, 'If you can do no good, do no harm.' If this rule is adhered to, in ninety-nine cases out of one hundred the physician will give no alcohol. In the medical wards of the Pennsylvania Hospital I have found that in acute as well as chronic disease ​we can do without alcohol. It does harm rather than good. Alcohol masks the symptoms of disease, so that we cannot know the patient's real condition."—J. H. Museer, M. D., Philadelphia, Pa., Ex-President American Medical Association.
"It is time alcohol was banished from the medical armamentarium; whisky has killed thousands where it cured one."—J. H. McCormack, M. D., Secretary Kentucky Board of Health, and Organizer for the American Medical Association.
"I very rarely use alcohol in my practice. I think that its use is never essential. Physicians are using it less and less in the treatment of disease owing to the recognition that it is a narcotic, not a stimulant, and that other narcotics are usually better when a narcotic is required."—Richard C. Cabot, M. D., Professor of Clinical Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Mass.
"My position has been that alcohol should be prescribed with as much care as to indications and circumspection as to dose and method as in the use of any other drug that in health would prove harmful, as morphine, belladonna, aconite, quinine, etc. I believe strongly that in pneumonia, typhoid fever, and tuberculosis especially, the indiscriminate use of alcohol in the past has caused an incalculable amount of distress and needless disaster to suffering humanity."—Howard S. Anders, M. D., Professor of Physical Diagnosis, Medico-Chirurgical College, Philadelphia, Pa.
"I do not think alcohol of any value in the treatment of disease; formerly it was used a great deal in the hospital wards, and 'liquor slips' were daily signed. Now, I never order liquor in any quantity, and at times for weeks I have not signed a single slip ordering liquor."—Henry Jackson, M. D., Professor in Harvard Medical School.
"In the overwhelming majority of cases I am in entire sympathy with the movement to abolish the routine use of alcoholics from medicine, and I rarely advise such in my practice."—Edward R. Baldwin, M. D., Saranac Lake Sanitarium, New York.
​"I seldom prescribe alcohol."—George Blumer, M. D., Yale Medical School, New Haven, Conn.
"Whereas, The study of alcohol from a scientific standpoint has demonstrated that its action is deceptive, and that it does not have the medical properties that we once claimed for it; now, therefore, be it
"Resolved, By the West Virginia State Medical Association, That we deplore the fact that our profession has been quoted so long as claiming for it virtues which it does not possess, and that we earnestly pledge ourselves to discourage the use of it, both in and out of the sick room."—Resolution passed at annual meeting May, 1908.
"I have been actively engaged in the practice of medicine for nearly twenty-five years, in the early portion of which I prescribed alcoholics moderately but yet with considerable frequency. For the past ten years I have been finding professionally less place for alcoholics of any sort in my practise, and for perhaps three years I have scarcely ever prescribed them. I am satisfied that my cases of pneumonia and typhoid come through in better condition without anything alcoholic, even wines, and I no longer prescribe these at all in cases of tuberculosis. I have noted also that among my professional associates of the thinking rather than of the automatic type, the medicinal use of alcohol is rapidly lessening."—C. G. Hickey, M. D., Lecturer on Medicine, Denver and Gross College of Medicine, Denver, Colorado.
"In the thirteen years I have taught in Michigan I have not used alcohol in the treatment of disease in a routine way. Even alcoholic preparations, such as tinctures, have been used in very rare instances. I have occasion to speak on this subject every year to about two hundred students. My reasons for taking this stand are chiefly medical, though I am heartily in sympathy with the ethical and moral phases of the temperance movement." Dr. George Dock, formerly Professor of Medicine, University of Michigan Medical College, now of Tulane University, New Orleans.
"Alcohol is distinctly a poison, and the limitation of its use ​should be as strict as that of any other kind of poison. It is not an appetizer, and even in small quantities it hinders digestion. The use of alcohol is emphatically diminishing in hospital practise."—Sir Frederick Treves, Surgeon to King Edward.
"If during the last quarter of a century I have prescribed almost no alcohol in the treatment of disease, it is because I have found very little reason for its use, and it seemed to me that my patients got on better without it."—Sir James Baker, Dean of the Medical School of Liverpool University.
"With the increase of medical knowledge and with the increase of medical observation, it is shown every year that the value of alcohol as a drug has been enormously over-estimated. It is a very poor agent, and only in common use because it is so easily obtained. The medical profession is using it less and less, because they appreciate it now at its true value. Personally I never order it, because I believe patients recover better without it."—Sir Victor Horsley, Surgeon to London Hospital.
"The same care and discrimination should be given to the prescribing of alcohol as to the most deadly drug with which we have to deal. In looking at the report of Radcliffe In- firmary for the past month I see that in dealing with twenty- five cases I ordered alcohol costing exactly 1¾ pence."—Dr. William Collier, President British Medical Association, 1904.
"In England at present the use of large doses of alcohol seems to have greatly gone out of hospital practise, and opin- ion is certainly growing that not even small doses are re- quired. Diseases of the stomach, liver, heart, and kidneys have appeared to me, in my practise, to be much more sat- isfactorily treated without beer, wines, or spirits."—Dr. C. R. Drysdale, Consulting Physician to the Metropolitan Hos- pital, London.
"Alcohol is a functional and tissue poison, and there is no proper or necessary use for it as medicine."—Dr. Frank Payne, Vice-President London Pathological Society.
​"Of scarlet fever I have treated some 2,000 cases. I have never seen a case in which, in my opinion, alcohol was necessary; no case in which its administration was beneficial; but I have seen more than one case in which its action was directly injurious. * * * Alcohol in no case averts a fatal issue where such is impending. * * * The facts are dead against alcohol. In hospitals there has been an increase of 300 per cent, in the use of milk, and a decline of 47 per cent, in the use of alcohol. Progress in treatment of disease has gone hand in hand with disuse of alcohol. The use of alcohol formerly was the outcome of ignorance, a confession of weakness and defeat; to-day it is the expression of inability to discard the fetters of an outworn routine." Dr. C. Knox Bond, in Medical Times.
"For many years I have dispensed almost entirely with al- cohol as an aid in surgical treatment. As a student I saw it used, almost as a matter of routine, for every kind of surgical malady except head injuries, and in my early years I naturally followed the practise of my teachers; but as soon as I made trial for myself of the effect of withholding alcohol, I found how entirely overrated its value was, and how gravely mistaken had been the teaching. It is commonly held, I believe, that alcoholic stimulants are of especial value in all forms of septic inflammation, such as erysipelas, pyæmia, septicæmia, and hectic fever. I believe that this belief is founded solely upon tradition unsupported by any trustworthy evidence, and untested by experiment or experience." Dr. A. Pearce Gould, F. R. C. S., Surgeon to the Middlesex Hospital, London.
"I have not prescribed alcohol to my patients for more than ten years, and can affirm positively that they have fared well under this change of treatment. Since I formerly followed the universal practice, I am competent to make comparisons, and these speak unconditionally in favor of treatment without alcohol. As a preventive of waste I use among fever patients nothing but real foods; in addition to milk, ​particularly sugar, which can be administered to any fever patient in ample quantity in the form of fruit juices, stewed fruit, sweet lemonade, fruit ices, sugared tea, etc., concerning which hundreds of investigations have demonstrated positively that it prevents the. waste of both albumen and fat. As a stimulant I employ, besides hydriatic methods, which at the same time abstract heat, almost nothing but camphor, and I can affirm that it is unconditionally preferable to alcohol for its prompt results and the absence of disagreeable after-effects (intoxication, benumbing). Pneumonia, especially, subsides without alcohol to perfect satisfaction, and I rejoice to agree in this respect with Aufrecht, one of the best authorities on this disease, who in his monograph in Nothnagle's manual, acknowledges himself hostile to the use of alcohol in the treatment of pneumonia, and hopes that its use may be speedily abolished. For the reasons previously specified, I should like to see that extended to all use of alcohol in therapeutics. However, that can come to pass only when all thinking physicians clearly appreciate the fact that no substance is able to undertake the double role of a food and a poison, and, also, that for alcohol no nutritive, but only toxic properties can be claimed."—Max Kassowitz, M. D., Professor in the University of Vienna, Austria
"Besides its deleterious influence on the nervous system and other important parts of our body, alcohol has a harmful action on the phagocytes, the agents of natural defense against infective microbes."—Prof. Metchnikoff, Pasteur Institute, Paris, France.
"Alcoholic liquors are, to my mind, not only not valuable, but distinctly disadvantageous, in the treatment of disease, except in rare instances, as for example in the initial chill of some acute infectious disease. However, I have almost given up the use of alcohol in the treatment of disease." Dr. D. L. Edsall, Professor of Therapeutics in the University of Pennsylvania Medical School.
"As a rule which might well be regarded as universal in the practice of medicine, alcohol in the treatment of disease ​is an evil. In ordinary doses and in continuous use the sum of its reactions increases exhaustion, which may terminate fatally."—Dr. John Van Duyn, Professor of Medicine in Syracuse, N. Y., University Medical School.
"In sixteen years of active practice I have not used alcoholics at all. I am medical director of the Scranton Sanitarium, and I have considerable trouble in trying to cure those who use alcohol, and to undo some of the work my fellow practitioners have unwittingly made."—D. Webster Evans, M. D., Scranton, Pa.
"I am opposed to the use of alcoholic liquors as a beverage, and with rare exceptions, to their use in the treatment of diseases."—Dr. Eugene Kerr, Physician to Phipps Dispensary, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, Md.
"In my professional work I do not advise or permit the use of alcohol as a beverage or medicine in any form whatever. No alcohol is used medicinally in my hospital wards. Beer or wine is not permitted to convalescents. Children are never given tinctures. Cases of delirium tremens receive no alcohol. The hypodermic use of alcohol is not permitted in cases of shock. There are other much more effective and less depressing diffusable stimulants.
"Among my colleagues the employment of alcohol as a medicine has diminished at least seventy-five per cent, in the past fifteen years.
"I have cast it out entirely."—J. P. Warbasse, M. D., Chief Surgeon German Hospital, Brooklyn, N. Y.
"The habitual use of alcohol in any disease is worse than harmful."—Robert B. Prebele, M. D., Chicago, Ill.
"The last few years I find I have used less and less alcohol in prescribing for my patients until at the present time I use very little. I think my typhoid cases do better without alcohol than with it."—H. H. Healy, M. D., former Sec'y North Dakota Board of Health.
"Alcohol is a poison. It is claimed by some that alcohol is a food. If so, it is a poisoned food."—Fredrcik Peterson, M. D., Professor of Psychiatry, Columbia University, N. Y.
​"Few physicians now credit alcohol as a food (that is, as a tissue builder) or as having any valuable medicinal qualities. In fact, it is considered by many to have a destructive rather than a constructive quality. I believe it should never be put into the human body."—Eugene Hubbell, M. D., St. Paul, Minn.
"The medical profession is learning that alcohol has been much abused in the treatment of the sick, and is largely discarding it. I hardly find occasion to prescribe it once a year."—W. A. Flecker, M. D., Sec'y State Board of Health, Hampton, Va.
"The use of alcohol as a beverage or therapeutically, is in either case a habit of the user. The stimulation is but temporary, the reaction leaving the nerve cells of the individual with less resisting power than before the ingestion of alcohol. * * * Never permit a verbal or written prescription of yours to give rise to the use of a habit forming drug."—From a lecture to students in Omaha Medical College by J. M. Aiken, M. D., Clinical Instructor and Lecturer upon Nervous and Mental Diseases.
'The use of spirits as a stimulant in diseases, except in a very limited circle, is a mere empiricism for which no good reasons can be given. The teachings of medical men are no more to be followed blindly and without question. The tests of alcohol as a tonic, as a food, as a stimulant, as a retarder of waste, are all negative. There is no reliable evidence to support these claims, but a constant accumulation of facts to indicate the danger from the use of spirits. To give alcohol or any other drug without some rational theory in accord with the scientific researches of to-day is unpardonable."—Dr. T. D. Crothers, Hartford, Conn., Editor of the Journal of Inebriety.
​"You are right in indicting alcohol for its insidious wrongs to humanity. It is an old and sly offender and very much the 'mocker' in medical practise that it has been pronounced in holy writ. It exhausts the latent energy of the organism often when that power is most needed to conserve the failing strength of the body in the battle with disease."—Dr. C. H. Hughes, St. Louis, Missouri.
"The best class of thinkers, men of the best intellectual gauge, are those who are doing away with this miserable, unscientific practise of giving liquor."—Dr. Boynton, Clifton Springs, N. Y.
"I believe that in the scientific light of the present era alcohol should be classed among the anaesthetics and poisons, and that the human family would be benefited by its entire exclusion from the field of remedial agents."—Dr. J. S. Cain, Dean of the Faculty, Medical Department, University of the South, Sewanee, Tenn.
"Let me cite my experience in surgery for the last three years in proof of the uselessness of alcohol, and the benefit of abstinence from its administration. During that time I have performed more than one thousand operations, a large portion upon cases of railroad injuries, one hundred for appendicitis, and in none of these was alcohol administered in any form, either before, during, or after operations. I defy any one who still adheres to alcohol to show as good results. Equally gratifying results have been obtained with my medical cases, and I fail to understand how any observing and thinking physician can still cling to so prejudicial a drug as alcohol, when he has within his reach a multitude of valuable, exact, and reliable methods for combating, governing, and controlling disease."—Dr. Evan C. Kane, Surgeon Pennsylvania Railroad, Kane, Pa.
"In my neurological practice I emphatically forbid my patients the use of alcohol. This poison has a special predilection for the nervous system which it influences sometimes to an alarming extent."—Alfred Gordon, M. D., Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, Pa.
​"Alcohol finds no place in my remedial list. It has been banished, not from sentiment, but from knowledge secured by scientific investigation."—T. Alexander MacNicholl, M. D., New York City, one of the founders of the Red Cross Hospital, New York.
"No sound, scientific argument can be offered for the medical use of alcohol, either internally or externally. It is a toxic substance which ought to be retired from the materia medica, and placed in the catalog of obsolete drugs along with tobacco, lobelia, and like useless but highly toxic drug substances."—Dr. J. H. Kellogg, Superintendent Battle Creek Sanitarium, Battle Creek, Michigan.
"The majority of medical men, without making any searching investigation into the abundant recent literature upon the subject of alcohol, are disposed to regard it with less and less favor as the years go by, while those who have closely followed the thorough investigations into the physiological action of alcohol recently made by scientists, have repudiated it altogether. * * * It is a lack of information upon this subject together with the fact that alcohol has been used as a therapeutic agent for hundreds of years, during which it has formed the basis of all tonic or stimulating treatment that gives alcohol its present hold upon a part of the medical profession."—John Madden, M. D., Portland, Oregon, formerly professor in Milwaukee Medical College.
"Alcohol may fill an emergency when better means are not at hand, but, apart from this, I know of no use in the practise of medicine and surgery for which we have not better weapons at our command. There is but one reason for the continued use of alcohol men use it because they love it."—Dr. W. F. Waugh,. Chicago, Editor Journal of Clinical Medicine.
"If alcohol had become a candidate for recognition years ago instead of centuries ago it is safe to say that its application in medicine would have been very much more limited than we find it at the present time. Its wide therapeutic use is to be attributed in part to fallacies and misconception ​regarding its pharmacology, and in part to a disinclination on the part of the average practitioner of medicine to depart from old and well-beaten lines."—Winfield S. Hall, M. D., Professor of Physiology, Northwestern University Medical School, Chicago.
"In its relation to the human system, alcohol is never constructive and always destructive."—Prof. Frank Woodbury, M. D., Philadelphia, Pa.
"The clinicians who decide for the deleterious action of alcohol in infectious conditions have what evidence of an experimental nature we possess at the present time to support their impressions. The advocates of the continuous use of the drug have this evidence against them." Henry F. Hewes, M. D., Harvard Medical School, Boston, Mass.
"I am very glad that you are undertaking so important a work as this in connection with the terrible problem of alcoholism. Physicians need awakening in this matter; they need reform. The evil results of alcohol are unfortunately brought to my notice each day of my life as I pursue my vocation and my public duties as Health Officer, and a reform in prescribing so as to eliminate alcohol would undoubtedly have far-reaching beneficent effects."—Edward Von Adelung, M. D., Health Officer, Oakland, Cal.
"I am forwarding you a report of 303 cases of typhoid fever treated without alcohol, and my reasons for not using it. I believe the results will not suffer by comparison with those obtained in other hospitals where alcohol is used. Wishing you lasting success in your war upon the greatest evil of the times."—J. H. Landis, M. D., Cincinnati, O.
"Only precise evidence that it (alcohol) is able to protect albumen from destruction can warrant its employment and establish its value as a food in the sick diet. And this evidence which is of determinative importance must be looked upon as having failed, according to the recent investigations of Stammreich and Miura (who both worked under von Noorden's direction), as well as by Schmidt, Schöneseiffen and Roseman. The uniform result of all these experiments, ​arrived at by altogether different methods, is that alcohol does not possess albumen sparing power; that it even brings about an undoubted breaking down of albumen, and consequently it is entirely unequal to carbohydrates and fat."—Dr. Julian Marcuse, a contributing editor of Die Heilkunde, a German medical magazine. See issue of July, 1900.
"Thirty years ago the general principle of practice was stimulation. Alcohol was supposed to rouse up and support vital forces in disease. Twenty-three years ago the first practical denial was put into a permanent position in a public hospital in London, where alcohol was seldom or never used * * * Doctor Richardson's researches showing the anaesthetic nature of alcohol have had a great influence in changing medical practice in England. * * * On the Continent a number of scientific workers have published researches confirming Doctor Richardson's conclusions, and bringing out other facts as to the action of alcohol on the brain and nervous system. These papers and the discussions which followed have been slowly working their way into the laboratory and hospital, and have been tested and found correct, materially changing current opinions, and creating great doubts of the value of alcohol.
"In 1896, the prosecution of Doctor Hirschfeld, a Magdeburg physician, in the German courts, for not using alcohol in a case of septicemia, seemed to be the central point for a new demonstration of the danger of the- use of alcohol in medicine. Doctor Hirschfeld was acquitted on the testimony of a large number of leading physicians from the large hospitals and universities of Europe. It was proved that alcohol was not a remedy which was specifically required in any disease; also that its value was most seriously questioned as a general remedy by many able men, and its substitution was practical and literal in most cases. Statistics were presented proving that alcohol was dangerous, and never a safe remedy, and laboratory investigations confirming and explaining its action were given. Since then a sharp reaction has been going on in Europe, and alcohol is rapidly declining and passing away as a common remedy.
​"Doctor Frick, an eminent teacher of medicine in Zurich, Switzerland, and Doctor von Speyer, of the University of Berne, have made statistical studies of cases treated with and without alcohol, and have analyzed the effects of spirits as medicinal agents to check and antagonize disease, and assert very positively, that alcohol is a dangerous and exceedingly doubtful remedy. Doctor Meyer, of the University of Gottenburg, Doctor Möbius, of Leipsic, and Doctor Wehberg, of Dusseldorf, are equally prominent physicians who have taken the same position, and are equally emphatic in their denunciations of the current beliefs concerning alcohol in medicine.—Journal A. M. A., January 6, 1900.
Dr. H. D. Didama, Dean of the Medical College of Syracuse University, Syracuse, N. Y., said in January, 1898, in the Voice:—
"For many years after my graduation at Albany, in 1846, I prescribed alcohol, and for twenty years, while occupying the chair of professor of the science and art of medicine in the College of Medicine of Syracuse University, I followed in my lectures—often reluctantly and usually afar off, but still I followed—the almost unanimous teaching of authors, ancient and modern, and the professors in the medical schools.
"Convinced that a great number of the diseases I was called to treat owed their existence or aggravation to the use, in alleged moderation, of alcoholic beverages, and that not in a few instances this use was commenced and even continued by the advice of the medical attendants; convinced also by the published experiments of many acute observers at home and abroad, and by my own observations, that almost all diseases could be managed as well if not better by the non-use of alcohol, and satisfied from the communications of some brother practitioners that the fatality in certain specified diseases was not delayed, to say the least, by the employment of increasing and enormous doses of wine, whisky and brandy, ​and influenced also, I must admit—overwhelmed, indeed—by what I know and what I read daily of the pauperism, domestic wretchedness, crime, insanity and incurable maladies transmitted to innocent offspring, I abandoned entirely, more than three years ago, the use of alcoholic remedies.
"I have endeavored by personal example and earnest council to dissuade my patients from the use of intoxicating beverages and medicines.
"The outcome of this practice, medically and morally, has been satisfactory to myself, and, I have reason to believe, to my patients also.
"Whatever regrets I may feel for my former teaching and practice, I have no apology to offer for my inconsistency except that once given by Gerrit Smith:— 'I know more today than I did yesterday; the only persons who never change their minds are God and a fool.'
"Permit me to add that while there may be an honest difference of opinion regarding the efficacy of legislative enactments in overcoming or restraining the drink habit, there should be little doubt that a whole-hearted, persistent, precept-and-example effort of the medical profession exerted as individuals on their patients and the families of their patients, and as associations on the community at large, would do immeasurable good.
"And the newspapers might aid materially in this beneficent work if, while they continue to spread before our households every day the details of the brawls and fights of drunken men and the horrible murders which they commit, they would discontinue advertising, without warning or dissent, side by side with the atrocities, the 'innocuous beers,' the pure malt whiskies, the genuine brandies, guaranteed to prevent and cure all manner of diseases."
The following testimony from an English physician is significant:—
"Although I know beforehand that their united testimony ​must be in favor of the practice of total abstinence from all intoxicating drinks, being most conducive to health and longevity of their patients, but very inimical to the pocket interests of themselves, my own experience is, that my teetotal patients are seldom ill, and that they get well very soon again, if they are attacked by disease. A higher principle than that of gain must influence a medical man's mind, or he will never advocate the doctrine of total abstinence."—J. J. Ritchie, M. R. C. S., Leek.
"One of the most dangerous phases of the use of alcohol is the production of a feeling of well being in weakly, dyspeptic, irritable, nervous or anaemic patients. In consequence of the temporary relief so obtained, the patient develops a craving for alcohol, which in many cases can end only in one way, and, as I felt compelled to tell an assembly of ladies a short time ago, the very symptoms for the alleviation of which alcohol is usually taken are those, the presence of which renders it exceedingly desirable that alcohol should not be taken."—Dr. G. Sims Woodhead, of London.
In an address upon the London Temperance Hospital delivered shortly before his death, Sir B. W. Richardson gave a brief review of the influences which led him to abandon the medical use of alcohol. The following is taken from that address as reported in the Medical Pioneer:—
"I was a member of the Vestry of St. Marylebone, and we had in our parish a very serious outbreak of small-pox, attended with a considerable mortality. In his report to us Dr. Whitmore stated that in his treatment of earlier cases of the confluent and hemorrhagic, and malignant forms of disease, stimulants of wine and brandy were freely administered without any apparent benefit; and, that after consultation with Mr. Cross, the resident surgeon, they resolved to substitute simple ​nutriments, such as milk, eggs and beef-tea, at frequent intervals, with discontinuance of stimulants altogether. The result of the change was most satisfactory, and many bad cases did well, which under the stimulant plan they believed would have terminated fatally. Again I was struck very much by a report made by Mr. Cadbury, in which that gentleman showed the course that was going on in various hospitals. The amount of alcohol in twelve hospitals in London, taken by the inpatients, varied in ounces from 37,531 in one establishment to 300,094 in another during the year 1878. I also found, from the same author, that the whole cost in St. George's Union Infirmary for the year 1878 was £8. 3s. 6d., amongst 2,496 patients, while the cost of the same number at the average of the twelve hospitals was £124. About this same time I also remarked that in many of the public institutions of England there was a reduction something similar in kind, if not to the same extent, and that the number of persons who suffered seemed to make better recoveries than those who were taking the free amount of stimulant. The effect of these observations chimed in very remarkably with the physiological experiments it had been my duty to carry out, and which tended to show in a most striking manner that the action of alcohol in the body very much differed from the ordinary opinion that had been held upon it, and thereupon, in my own practice, I abandoned the use of alcohol, and began to give instead small quantities of simple, nourishing, dietic food, a course I pursued up to the present time with the most satisfactory results, results I have never felt any occasion to regret. By these steps, learned in the first place from the study of alcohol in its action on man, I was led to become a believer that alcohol is of no more service in disease than it is in health, and a lengthened experience in this matter has really confirmed the correctness of the idea."
In his last report as physician to the Temperance Hospital Dr. Richardson made some remarkable ​statements upon the fallacy of the general ideas of stimulation. So interesting are his views that they are incorporated here:—
"Sir B. W. Richardson, M. D., who was unable to be present, communicated (through the secretary) his annual report as physician to the hospital. After twelve months further trial of the treatment of all kinds of disease in this institution without the assistance of alcohol, either as a diet or a medicine, he (Sir B. W. Richardson) was fully sustained in the belief that the plan pursued had been attended with every possible advantage. About 500 cases had come under his observation and treatment as in previous years, and these cases had been of the most varied kind, including all patients who were not directly suffering from contagious disease. In not one instance had alcohol been administered, nor had anything like it been used in the way of a substitute, and there had not been a single case in which he could conceive that it was ever called for, while the success which had attended the treatment generally had been superior to anything he had ever seen following upon the administration of alcoholic stimulants. One great truth which had forced itself upon him had reference to the doctrine of stimulation generally. It had been one of the grand ideas in medicine that there came times when sick people were benefited by being stimulated. It was argued that they were low, and in order that they might be raised and brought nearer to the natural life they required something like alcohol to quicken the circulation, quicken the secretion, and help to preserve the vitality. But the experience which was learned here tended to show in the most distinct manner that that very old and apparently rational idea was fallacious. Such stimulation only tended ultimately to wear out the powers of the body, as well as change the physical conditions under which the body worked. True lowness meant practical over-fatigue, and when the body was spurred on, or stimulated, over-fatigue was ​simply intensified and increased. What, therefore, was wanted was not stimulation, but repose. The sufferer was placed in the best position to gain entire rest, and all the surroundings or environments were employed which tended to prevent waste. The air was kept at the proper temperature, the body of the patient kept warm, and the simplest and most easily digested foods were used; the patient's condition then swung round to a natural state, and he began to get well. In other cases where the sick were brought under observation suffering already from excitable condition of the senses, with congestions here and there of the circulatory or nervous systems, with imperfect condition of the brain, and with the elements of what was usually denominated inflammatory or febrile state—the stimulant was already present (was, indeed the cause of the symptoms) and did not want in any degree to be enforced further by the acts of treatment. Here, therefore, they were on the safest grounds as regarded methods of administration, for they calmed as well as they possibly could both mind and body and left nature to do the rest, which she did with the best and most tranquilizing effect. On both sides, therefore, in the treatment of disease, they did good, and that was the reason, he believed, why their returns were so satisfactory. It often happened in an institution where some particular plan was carried out that the old ideas in which they had been bred were without intention refined or suppressed. For example, he had been taught, and believed for a number of years, that some medicament of a particular kind was needful for some particular train of symptoms, be the surrounding conditions what they might. There was no doubt that this same feeling .had given rise to the persistent use of alcohol; but, greatly to his own surprise, he discovered that when the surroundings were all good, the rule that applied to alcohol constantly applied to other substances that were called remedies, with the result that recovery was often just as good without the particular remedies as with them, so that a revision came quite simply with regard to stimulating agents and their ​properties, and also with regard to every medicine that might at earlier times have been employed. He had seen many cases in this hospital recover without any other aid than that of the environments, which cases he would have said could not possibly have gone on well, or towards complete recovery, unless some special recipe had been followed. He believed the day would come when others, learning this same truth as he had been obliged to learn it, would act on such simple principles that the books of remedies would have to be vastly curtailed. It would be seen that there was such a tendency of disease to get well of itself, or by virtue of natural processes, of which people had at present but a very poor idea, that the art of physic would pass into directions how to live rather than into dogmatic assertions that particular means must be employed in addition to the common details of life for the process of cure. If therefore they learned in this hospital by their reduced death-rates the true lesson, the institution would have performed a double duty, and become one of the test objects in medicine, and in the field of disease. They made no attempt by selection, or by any side action, to exaggerate their results. The cases were taken indiscriminately, except that they gave admission to the worst cases first; that was to say, they never caused patients to come under their treatment if they saw they were only slightly affected, and were bound to get well."—Medical Pioneer,
Dr. Landmann, of Boppard-on-the-Rhine, Germany, says:—
"The members of the Association of Abstaining Physicians, reject the use of spirituous liquors in every form, and particularly declare the use of alcohol at the sick-bed a scientific error of the saddest kind. In order to war against this abuse, they earnestly appeal to the officers having charge of funds for the sick, henceforth, under no circumstances, any longer to permit the prescription of wine, whisky and brandy for sick members; but to resist to the utmost, according to the right given them ​by the laws insuring the sick, the taking of spirituous liquors, under the false pretext that they have a curative and strengthening effect."
Dr. Bleuler, Rheineau, Switzerland, says:—
"The treatment of chronic diseases with alcohol is contrary to our knowledge of the physiological effects of alcohol. There is no probability that its use will be beneficial, certainly its benefits have not been established. Often an injurious result is proved.
"It is not implied that there may not be some benefit in the use of alcohol in cases of sudden weakness with or without fever. But even in such cases the benefit is not demonstrated. At any rate, other remedies can with advantage be substituted for alcohol.
"The essential thing in the treatment of all alcoholic diseases, delirium tremens included, is total abstinence.
"The physiological effect of alcohol is that of a poison, whose use is to be limited to the utmost. Even the moderate use as now practiced is injurious.
"The customary beneficial results unquestionably depend chiefly on suggestion, and by making the patient believe falsely that the momentary subjective better feeling means actual improvement.
"Physicians share the blame of the present flood of alcoholism. They are, therefore, morally bound to remedy the evil. Only by means of personal abstinence can this be done."
Dr. A. Frick, professor in Zurich, is a careful student and an influential writer on alcohol. His statements are weighty. This is his testimony:—
"In larger doses, alcohol is absolutely injurious in the treatment of acute fevers, especially in case of pneumonia, typhus and erysipelas. They first of all injure the general state ​of the patient, they cause delirium, or increase it if already existing, and, secondly, they injure most seriously the organs of digestion and interfere with proper nourishment; thus they have a weakening effect, instead of preventing weakness, which they are usually supposed to do. In case no alcohol is used, the convalescence is much more rapid. In no case has the benefit of treatment with alcohol been established. According to the view of the most eminent pharmacologists, the stimulating effect of alcohol consists simply in a local irritation of the mucous membrane of the stomach, similar to that produced by a mustard plaster."
The following selection from the excellent address of Dr. Harvey, president of the Virginia State Medical Society, at a recent meeting, is a most timely caution:—
"Our prisons, asylums and homes are filled with the victims of the careless and indiscriminate use by the medical profession of those twin demons, alcohol and opium, which, save tuberculosis, are doing more to debase and destroy the human race than all the other diseases together. I most earnestly beseech you, young men, who are just starting out in life, to stay your hand in the use of these agents in your own persons, and in your daily work, and to beware of the seductive needle, and the cup that inebriates. Make it an invariable rule, never to prescribe alcohol, nor one of the solinaceus or narcotic drugs, if you can possibly avoid it. The use of alcohol and opium debases the minds and morals of habitués, predisposes especially to Bright's disease and insanity, and lays the foundation in the offspring for the majority of the neuroses and degenerations of modern civilized life. The physical fatigue of long working hours, loss of sleep, mental strain, worry and hunger, invite the tired physician, especially, to their seductive use. To totally abstain from them is always business, and very often character, and even life itself. I feel free to speak to you on this subject ​very earnestly, my younger brothers, for, having prescribed alcohol for over thirty years, I am familiar with its tendencies and its dangers."
Dr. T. D. Crothers of Hartford, Conn., in an article upon "The Decline of Alcohol as a Medicine," says:—
"Thoughtful observers recognize that alcohol as a medicine is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Ten years ago leading medical men and text-books spoke of stimulants as essentials of many diseases, and defended their use with warmth and positiveness. To-day this is changed. Medical men seldom refer to spirits as remedies, and when they do, express great conservatism and caution. The text-books show the same changes, although some dogmatic authors refuse to recognize the change of practice, and still cling to the idea of the food value of spirits.
"Druggists who supply spirits to the profession recognize a tremendous dropping off in the demand. A distiller who, ten years ago, sold many thousand gallons of choice whiskies, almost exclusively to medical men, has lost his trade altogether, and gone out of business. Wine men, too, recognize this change, and are making every effort to have wine used in the place of spirits in the sick-room. Proprietary medicine dealers are putting all sorts of compounds of wine with iron, bark, etc., on the market with the same idea. It is doubtful if any of these will be able to secure any permanent place in therapeutics.
"The fact is, alcohol is passing out of practical therapeutics because its real action is becoming known. Facts are accumulating in the laboratory, in the autopsy room, at the bedside, and in the work of experimental psychologists, which show that alcohol is a depressant and a narcotic; that it cannot build up tissue, but always acts as a degenerative power; and that its apparent effects of raising the heart's action and quickening functional activities are misleading and erroneous.
​"French and German specialists have denounced spirits both as a beverage and a medicine, and shown by actual demonstration that alcohol is a poison and a depressant, and that any therapeutic action it is assumed to have is open to question.
"All this is not the result of agitation and wild condemnation by persons who feel deeply the sad consequences of the abuse of spirits. It is simply the outcome of the gradual accumulation of facts that have been proven within the observation of every thoughtful person. The exact or approximate facts relating to alcohol can now be tested by instruments of precision. We can weigh and measure the effects, and it is not essential to theorize or speculate; we can test and prove with reasonable certainty what was before a matter of doubt.
"Medical men who doubt the value of spirits are no more considered fanatics or extremists, but as leaders along new and wider lines of research. Alcohol in medicine, except as a narcotic and anaesthetic, is rapidly falling into disfavor, and will soon be put aside and forgotten."