TEMPERANCE AND HEALTH

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Mar 25, 1880

TEMPERANCE AND HEALTH.

The temperance question is of great importance in its moral and religious bearings, in its social and political aspects; but it is also essentially a health question. It is intimately connected with the prevention of disease and the promotion of health. Drunkenness is one of the diseases produced by the use of alcoholic drink, and it can only be cured by entire abstinence from the drink which causes it. This is now generally known. It is not, however, equally well known that all intoxicating drinks are not only unnecessary to persons in health, but positively injurious. But all who have studied the subject practically, by physiological research, by extended observation and personal abstinence, will indorse the opinion that strong drink is unnecessary and injurious.

There is also a general opinion among persons who have studied the physiological action of alcohol, that the medical profession labor under error as to the use of alcohol in the treatment of disease—that it is used when unnecessary, and frequently with the most injurious results. The work of temperance reformers, then, is to obtain and diffuse correct information as to the nature and effects of alcoholic liquors, and the safety and advantages of abstinence. They are the true sanitary reformers; for temperance is a most important part of preventive medicine. Without saying a word in disparagement of other efforts for the promotion of the public health, we are convinced that nothing could conduce so much to the physical improvement and social elevation of the lower classes of our countrymen as total abstinence from strong drink. In attempting to diffuse sound views respecting strong drink, we have to encounter the prejudices arising from want of physiological knowledge. At present, an acquaintance with physiology does not form a part of popular education. And we have met with persons who have received what has until recently been considered a good education who knew nothing of their own bodies or minds, nothing of light, heat, or electricity, nothing of the sources of health and strength, or of the nature of food and drink, or, in other words, nothing of the experimental or biological science. And if this want of knowledge is to be found in the educated, what must be the condition of the uneducated? Can we wonder at the popular delusions respecting strong drink?—Christian at Work.