The Cup of Devils by D. T. Taylor

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 1, 1875

The Cup of Devils.

By D. T. Taylor

DRINKING POISON.

Pure alcohol is a poison. All toxicologists, chemists, and physicians, rank it as such. Now, from one-twentieth to one-twelfth of each and every glass of malt liquor, from one-tenth to one-fifth of every glass of wine, and full one-half of every glass of whisky, brandy, rum, and gin, are pure alcohol, provided these are unadulterated. Hence, all alcoholic beverages are poisonous. In all such drinks alcohol is the main element of intoxication, and nothing but a poison will produce intoxication. You cannot get intoxicated on water, or milk, or any other non-poisonous substance. On the other hand, nearly all poisons will cause in animals and men some or all the features of drunkenness. He, then, who uses alcoholic beverages deliberately drinks poison. He who is thus intoxicated is poisoned just in the degree of his intoxication. The moderate drinker is moderately poisoned, and the drunkard is violently poisoned.

To poison one's self is suicide. And so we prove the moderate drinker and the drunkard to be self-murderers, suicides. He who furnishes this poison for a sum of money becomes an accomplice with the suicide. Meanwhile he also aids him to the commission of vice and crime. Back of this lies bad law that allows the double guilt, and the government, State, or individual that by authority of corrupt law grants men license to traffic in such poisons becomes one in depth of guiltiness with the criminal-maker and his victim, the self-destroyer. If it be right to make and sell poisonous drinks, no license should be required; all may traffic in them freely. If wrong, no license should be granted, none should be permitted to deal in them. To make, to sell, to drink poisonous beverages, is to hug vice, crime, and murder. To license is to foster all these, and miseries unnumbered. Rum-selling is the peerless crime of the age, and every rum-hole is a nuisance, a devil's-trap, a murder-house.

“Toxicologists,” writes Col. J. G. Dudley, “divide poisons into three classes—irritants, narcotics, and narcotico-irritants. Alcohol belongs to the latter class. The first effect of alcohol is to excite, irritate, goad, or stimulate; the second to stupefy, narcotize, paralyze; the third effect is death, or perhaps a long train of half a hundred diseases.” Dr. James Edmunds, a distinguished physician of England, in a recent address at New York, said, “If a man takes a pint of brandy what do we see? It intoxicates, it poisons him. Intoxicant is a modification of the Latin intoxicum (poison). A man who is intoxicated is poisoned. Alcohol is a poison; we can kill a man by a single dose.” And he tells us that the effect of the poison may be acute or chronic, violent or slow, but whether in large or small doses alcohol is ever a poison. A few physicians regard this deadly fluid as possessing a force-giving, and food quality. Of this class is the late Professor Anstie of England, Dr. Edward Curtis, and Dr. W. A. Hammond, eminent in our country. But even the first-named held that all stimulants were poisons. The second writes, “In large quantities the excess of alcohol acts as a poison,” there being what he terms “a poison-line,” beyond which the drinker is carried to death, while the last-named declares that “pure alcohol is a violent poison,” and in a lately published address names twenty-five different and frightful diseases of the brain and nervous system that alcohol will cause.

But by far the majority of scientists pronounce alcohol a poison, and only a poison; hence to be used with rare caution as a medicine, but never as a common, daily beverage. Inspiration asserts it. Centuries ago, God said through inspired lips that the intoxicating cup contained a mocking, raging quality and bit as the serpent and adder bite, i. e., with deadly venom. Years since, the eminent English physician, Sir Astley Cooper, wrote, “Spirits and poisons are synonymous terms; I never suffer ardent spirits in my house, thinking them evil spirits.” Full thirty years ago Prof. A. Thompson said, “Ardent spirits can be justly regarded in no other point of view than either as a medicine or a poison.” As a medicine, he held it should seldom be prescribed, as it caused “cancer of the stomach, induration of the liver, epilepsy, tremens, chorea, mania, and death.” In 1857, Isaac V. Mullen, M. D., in a very able treatise asserted that “alcohol is fatal to animal life when swallowed in concentrated form, and is never ventured upon as a medicine in a pure state, from half an ounce to an ounce of the liquid causing death almost as instantaneously as carbonic acid.” In the same strain wrote Dr. Gillman in the (Boston) Surgical Journal, 1855, “Alcohol is a poison inimical to the human constitution.” Also, Dr. Murray, who affirmed, “Alcohol is a poison to our organization. It is never digested and converted into food.” To these we add the testimony of Sir Henry Thompson, at the head of his profession in England; Dr. H. O. Hitchcock, President of the Michigan State Board of Health; Dr. H. M. Romberg, of Berlin; Dr. J. H. Bennett, of Edinburgh; Dr. J. R. Nichols, editor of the Boston Journal of Chemistry; the editors of the Scientific American, Appleton's Encyclopædia, and a host of others. “It is a powerful and dangerous stimulant,” says Professor Sillman; “a brain poison,” writes Professor Youmans; “a dangerous poison,” says the chemist, Dr. Carpenter; “a corrosive poison,” testifies Dr. J. C. Peters; “a narcotico-acrid poison,” responds Dr. Alexander Peddie, of Edinburgh; “an irritant narcotic poison,” asserts Dr. D. G. Dodge, of Rouses Point, N. Y., who had the care of eight hundred drunkards in our State Asylum; “a poison,” echoes Dr. Joseph Parrish, who had charge of four hundred drunkards in Pennsylvania; “an universal poison,” wrote Dr. Kavanagh; “it is poisoning the blood of the generation,” exclaims Dr. J. G. Holland. Poison! poison! is everywhere the cry from the standpoint of the skilled physician who knows. “Alcohol,” wrote Dr. Monroe, of England, “is a powerful narcotic poison, and if a large dose be taken, no antidote is known!” And Dr. Elmer, of New York, repeats: “An irritant, narcotic poison, and when taken into the stomach in large doses, no antidote is known!” We may well read such warning words with alarm.

Dr. Forbes Winslow, a cultured physician to the English nobility, says: “Alcohol is not a necessary of life; it should be dealt with by the legislature as a poison. Every means should be had recourse to, to limit or restrict the sale of a poison, as you interfere with the indiscriminate sale of opium, prussic acid, or arsenic.” Boldly did this able medical gentleman stand up before the select committee on drunkenness, in the House of Commons, 1872, and exclaim, “I look upon alcohol as a poison.”

Physicians of every school in Clinton County, are these things so? And if alcoholic drinks are poisonous, are you telling the people of their destructive nature and using your powerful influence in behalf of abstinence and reform? Can you plead for “license” when you know the truth of what I herein affirm and conclusively prove? Of all men in the land you should be on the side of “prohibition” and God, and the rum-ridden people call on you to speak for the right. You are educated into a full knowledge of the “infernal stuff.” You are the people's medical advisers, and on you, gentlemen, rests a heavy responsibility in this war. Every true physician should, on principle, be an earnest temperance worker. The want of the age is MEN.—D. T. TAYLOR, in Plattsburgh Sentinel. Feb. 26, 1875.