Drinking among Women

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D.C. · Dec 5, 1907

Drinking among Women

A CHICAGO minister made the declaration that drinking was on the increase among women. His statement being questioned, he made an investigation, in which he visited the leading restaurants and saw hundreds of well-dressed ladies, two thirds of whom were drinking liquors. He chose the fashionable restaurants, because it was of the fashionable women he was speaking. The German government has been investigating the same matter in its relation to the conditions of health among its people, and the following is what a Berlin medical journal reports it has found:—

The decline of the ability of women to nurse their infants, the increase of dental caries, of nervousness in children; of mental diseases, of youthful criminals; of children who are backward in study and difficult to control, the great number of epileptics and idiots, and lastly, the increasing craze for the pursuit of pleasure.

The chief cause of this degeneracy is given as alcoholic drinking among women, especially among mothers. Professor Gerwin, in the Medizinisch Klinck, writing of the results of these investigations, shows the direct connection between the diseased cells of the bodies of drinkers and the degeneracy of their offspring. Says the Western Recorder of the methods pursued in the study of this question:—

The scientists had eggs hatched out in air containing alcoholic vapor. The result invariably was that the chickens were weak and had epileptic fits.

They found on examining the children who were stupid at learning that they had alcoholic mothers.