p. 14 | Increasing Insanity

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Apr 18, 1906

Increasing Insanity.

The New York World, condensing the report of the commission of the London County Council, charged with the supervision of the asylums for the insane, says that the report shows that insanity is on the increase in the United Kingdom. The number of insane poor reported in 1904 in the institutions of the county was 23,948, in 1905, 24,652. The principal cause is set down as alcoholism, which caused thirty per cent. of all cases registered. Inherited tendency has a high per cent. also. The whole tendency of the world is toward such a condition. The increased use of alcohol, the use of various substitutes for liquor, such as absinthe, cocaine, the large increase of narcotic drugs like morphia, nicotine, through tobacco, could result in no other way than in the unbalancing of the minds of their devotees. If every one of these powerful stimulants and narcotics could be abolished from the earth, humanity would be greatly benefited by the act. The only good that they do is mighty poor compensation for the untold evil which they accomplish.

Right in this connection the following item from Yale University is worthy of note. Out of the 334 freshmen who took examination in the gymnasium, 148 confessed to the use of tobacco, 44.3 per cent., the largest percentage of men who smoke ever observed in the annual examination of the physical condition of the incoming class. Sixty stated their inability to swim, and 113 were obliged to wear glasses. Of course the inability to swim might not be due to tobacco-using, and probably not all the defective eyes are due to the same cause, but tobacco-using has its bad effects upon the eyes, and it so unfits the physical man that it makes him disinclined to follow the natural sports of boys, among which is swimming. Would that all young men could see that the use of tobacco in any form is an enemy and only an enemy.