How Drink Kills | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 7, 1883

How Drink Kills.

JACOB L. GREENE, president of the Connecticut Mutual Life Assurance Company, says:—

“It has been my duty to read the records of and to make careful inquiry into the last illness and death of many thousand persons of all classes in all parts of the country. Two great features are shown in those records—the value of a man's inheritance, and the modifying force of habits of living upon that vitality. Every man is born with that amount of vital force that ought, accidents apart and humanly speaking, to carry him a specified distance on the scale of years, and each man's inheritance can, on the average, be fairly determined. Among the persons selected with care for physical soundness and sobriety, and who are, as a rule, respectable and useful members of society, the death rate is more profoundly affected by the use of intoxicating drinks than by any other one cause apart from hereditary. There are not among insured men a great many deaths in the gutter, nor of delirium tremens. There are a great many hobnailed livers and other diseases whose history is not far to seek; but in the majority of cases the effect is mainly apparent in the predisposition to disease caused by drink and the sap of the vital powers, impairing their ability to maintain healthy action under adverse circumstances, to sustain a conflict with disease, or to rally from a shock. The degree to which many diseases commonly referred to as malaria, overwork, and other vague, general scapegoat causes, are actually grounded in what would almost invariably be called a temperate use of drink by persons of reputed temperance habits, would be incredible to the mass of people unaccustomed to careful observation and comparison of related cases. That habitual, sottish drunkenness should issue in disease and death, most people can understand. But that moderate, soberly, decorous indulgence should issue in congested brains, insanity, suicide, paralysis, disease of kidneys, liver, stomach, pneumonia, rheumatism, and in general those diseases which at bottom mean a poison imparted into the blood, most persons do not know and are slow to believe.”