Medical Authority by Editor

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Oct 15, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 39.

Medical Authority.

By Editor

THE following extract from the Pacific Medical Journal is indorsed by the officers of the Home Life Insurance Company, of New York, and is used by them in the form of a circular:—

'The fashion of the present day, in the United States, sets strongly toward the substitution of beer for stimulating liquors. An idea appears to be gaining ground that it is not only nutritious, but conducive to health, and still further, that there does not attach to it that danger of creating intemperate habits which attends the use of other drinks. The subject is one of great magnitude, and deserves the attention of medical men as well as moralists.

'Many years ago, long before the moral sense of society was awakened to the enormous evils of intemperance, Sir Astley Cooper, an undisputed authority in his day, denounced habitual beer drinking as obnoxious to health. Referring to his experience in Guy’s hospital, he declared that the beer drinkers from the London breweries, though presenting the appearance of most rugged health, were the most incapable of all classes to resist disease; that trifling injuries among them were liable to lead to the most serious consequences, and so prone were they to succumb to disease, that they would die from gangrene in wounds as trifling as the scratch of a pin.

'We apprehend that no very great change either in men or beer has taken place since the days of that great surgeon.

'It may also be said of beer drinking that there is less limitation to it than the habitual use of other drinks. It does not produce speedy intoxication. When the drinker becomes accustomed to it, it will scarcely produce active intoxication in any quantity. It makes him heavy, sleepy, and stupid. Even in moderate quantities it tends to dullness and sluggishness of body and mind. Beer drinkers are constant drinkers. Their capacity becomes unlimited. The swelling of the drink becomes a regular business. It has no arrest or suspension like whisky drinking, to admit of recuperation. The old definition of a beer drinker was true:—

'Every morning an empty barrel, every night a barrel of beer.'

'Of all intoxicating drinks it is the most animalizing. It dulls the intellectual and moral, and feeds the sensual and beastly nature. Beyond all other drinks it qualifies for deliberate and unprovoked crime. In this respect it is much worse than distilled liquors.

'A whisky drinker will commit a murder only under the direct influence of liquor—a beer drinker is capable of doing it in cold blood. Long observation has assured us that a large proportion of murders, deliberately planned and executed without passion or malice, with no other motive than the acquisition of property or money, often of trifling value, are perpetrated by beer drinkers.

'We believe, further, that the hereditary evils of beer drinking exceed those proceeding from ardent spirits: first, because the habit is constant and without the paroxysmal interruptions which admit of some recuperation; second, because beer drinking is practiced by both sexes more generally than spirit drinking; and thirdly, because the animalizing tendency of the habit is more uniformly developed, thus authorizing the presumption that the vicious results are more generally transmitted.

'It will be inferred from these remarks that we take no comfort from the substitution of malt drinks for spirituous liquors. On the contrary, it is cause of apprehension and alarm that just as public opinion, professional and unprofessional, is uniting over all the world in condemnation of the common use of ardent spirits, the portals of danger and death are opening wide in another direction.'