Alcoholism

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Apr 13, 1905

In epidemics the excessive use of alcohol is almost identical with a death-warrant. Of one hundred hard drinkers attacked by the cholera ninety-one die, of moderate drinkers only nineteen. A wounded man who has poisoned his blood with alcohol is always in greater danger than an abstainer. According to English statistics the abstainers live on an average fourteen years longer than drinkers. Insanity, idiocy, moral depravity, hysteria, and epilepsy are only too frequently the lot of the offspring of a drunken father. A Swiss physician closely watched twenty families. Ten were moderate drinkers or abstainers, ten were used to excess for some generations. The former had, altogether, sixty-one children. Five of these died young, two were malformed, two were slow of development, two suffered of St. Vitus's dance. In the families of the heavy drinkers were seventy-five children. Twelve died young, and only nine were healthy. The rest were idiots, misshapen, deaf and dumb, or epileptic. Of eighty-three epileptic children at the Salpetriere, sixty had drunken parents.

Eggs subjected to alcoholic vapors give misshapen, sickly chickens. Dogs treated to doses of alcohol have epileptic young, or fail to produce live young at all. No wonder that terror seizes the heart of nations. Unless there is a change for the better, the majority of people in future generations will be unfit to live. Nor has all been told. We have statistics of those who die or are locked up as the result of alcoholism; but the many who go about free, who manage to do some kind of work, to marry and beget children, are not counted. They give the nation its death wound, from which it can not well recover.—The Literary Digest.