Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - Martha Meir Allen (readict books txt) 📗
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Prof. J. W. Carson, of the New York College of Physicians and Surgeons, says:—
“We do not know whether our patients recover because we give them medicine, or because nature cures them. Perhaps bread-pills would cure as many as medicine.”
Prof. Alonzo Clark, of the same college, has said:—
“In their zeal to do good physicians have done much harm; they have hurried many to the grave who would have recovered if left to nature.”
Prof. Martin Paine, of the New York University Medical College, said:—
“Drug medicines do but cure one disease by producing another.”
Dr. Marshall Hall, F. R. S.:—
“Thousands are annually slaughtered in the quiet sick-room.”
Dr. Adam Smith:—
“The chief cause of quackery outside the profession is the real quackery in the profession.”
Prof. Gilman:—
“The things that are administered for the cure of scarlet fever and measles kill far more than those diseases kill.”
Prof. Barker, of New York Medical College:—
“The drugs that are administered for the cure of scarlet fever kill far more patients than the disease does.”
Prof. Parker:—
“As we place more confidence in nature, and less in preparations of the apothecary, mortality diminishes.”
The examining physician of a large insurance company in New York said to a Mercury reporter:—
“The primary cause of so many cases of la grippe in this and other cities is the almost universal habit of drug taking from the milder tonics to patent medicines. Whenever the average man or woman feels depressed or slightly ill, resort is made at once to medicine, more or less strong. If they would try to find out the cause of the trouble, and seek to obviate it by regulating their mode of living, the general health of the community would be better. The drug habit tends continually to lower the tone of the system. The more it is indulged in the more apparent becomes the necessity of continuing the downhill course. The majority of persons do not look beyond the fact that they seem to feel better after the use of a stimulating drug, or patent medicine. This feeling comes from a benumbing action of the drug, because it has no uplifting action. With the system in such a weakened state, the microbes of the disease find excellent ground to grow.”
Dr. J. H. Kellogg says in the April, 1899, Bulletin of the A. M. T. A.:—
“Every drug capable of producing an artificial exhilaration of spirits, a pleasure which is not the result of the natural play of the vital functions, is necessarily mischievous in its tendencies, and its use is intemperance, whether its name be alcohol, tobacco, opium, cocaine, coca, kola, hashish, Siberian mushroom, caffeine, betel-nuts, maté or any other of the score or more enslaving drugs known to pharmacology. As the result of the depression which follows the unnatural elevation of sensation resulting from the use of one of these drugs, the second application finds the subject on a little lower level than the first, so that an increased dose is necessary to produce the same intensity of pleasure or the same degree of artificial felicity as the first. The larger dose is followed by still greater depression which demands a still larger dose as its antidote, and thus there is started a series of ever-increasing doses, and ever-increasing baneful after-affects, which work the ultimate ruin of the drug victim. All drugs which enslave are alike in this regard, however much they may differ otherwise in their physiological effects. Alcohol is universally recognized as only one member of a large family of intoxicating drugs, each of which is capable of producing specific functional and organic mischief, besides the vital deterioration common to the use of so-called felicity-producing drugs.
“Is it not evident, then, that in combating the use of alcohol we are attacking only one member of a numerous family of enemies to human life and happiness, every one of which must be exterminated before the evil of intemperance will be up-rooted?”
Among the most popular drugs for self-prescription at the present time are the coal-tar products. Of these Dr. N. S. Davis has said:—
“Only a few years since, the profession were taught to regard the degree of pyrexia, or heat, as the chief element of danger in all the acute general diseases. Consequently, to control the pyrexia became the leading object of treatment; and whatever would do this promptly, and at the same time allay pain and promote rest, found favor at the bedside of the patient.
“It was soon ascertained that antipyrin, antifebrin, phenacetin and other analogous products, if given in sufficient doses, would reduce the heat, and allay the pains with great certainty and promptness, not only in continued fevers, but also in rheumatism, influenza, or la grippe, etc.; and thus their use soon became popular with both the profession and the public. No one, however, undertook to first ascertain by strictly scientific appliances the actual pathological processes causing the pyrexia in each form of disease, or even to determine whether in any given case the increased heat was the result of increased heat production, or diminished heat dissipation. Neither were any of the remedies subjected to such experimental investigation as to determine their influence on the elements of the blood, the internal distribution of oxygen, the metabolism of the tissues, or on the activity of the eliminations. Consequently their exhibition was wholly empirical, and the one that subdued the pyrexia most promptly was given the preference. Yet we all know that the pyrexia invariably returned as soon as the effects of each dose were exhausted, and in a few years the results showed that while the antipyretics served to keep down the pyrexia, and give each case the appearance of doing well, the average duration of the cases, and their mortality, were both increased.
“Step by step experimental therapeutic investigations have proved that the whole class of coal-tar antipyretics reduce animal heat by impairing the capacity of the hemoglobin and corpuscular elements of the blood to receive and distribute free oxygen, and thereby reduce temperature by diminishing heat production, nerve sensibility and tissue metabolism. Therefore, while each dose temporarily reduces the fever, it retards the most important physiological processes on which the living system depends for resisting the effects of toxic agents; namely, oxidation and elimination. This not only encourages the retention of toxic agents and natural excretory materials by which specific fevers are protracted, but it greatly increases the number of cases of pneumonia that complicate the epidemic influenza, or la grippe, as it has occurred since 1888-89.
“The bad work that people make in dosing themselves with patent medicines, without a physician’s prescription is not unfrequently punctuated with a sudden death from overdosing with antipyrin, sulphonal, or some other coal-tar preparation.”
Dr. C. H. Shepard, Brooklyn, N. Y., says:—
“Quinine is a most fatal drug. Of course, it is the orthodox treatment for malarial conditions, but quinine never did nor never can cure malaria or any other disease. The action brought about by its use is simply to benumb the nervous activity and interfere with the natural action of the system to throw off the poison, which is expressed by the chill. Because of this interference with the manifestation or symptom of the disease, many imagine that the disease is being cured, but there never was a greater mistake. A drug disease is added to the original disease. This is shown by the invariable depression that follows the administration of the drug, and the length of time required to recuperate, which imperils restoration, and sometimes hastens the final results. This is ordinarily met by the use of what are called stimulants, that is, more drugs, and the last state is worst than the first; the poor patient is thus made the victim of a triple wrong, which only a most vigorous constitution can pass through and live, and even then he is crippled and made more liable to whatever disease may come along ever afterward.
“Disease is not entity to be killed by a shot from a professional gun, but a condition, an effort of outraged nature to free itself from an incumbrance, and should be aided rather than hindered by the administration of any nerve irritant. There never will come a time when the laws of health can be evaded. Nor is there any vicarious atonement. The full penalty of disobedience will invariably be exacted. The hunt for a panacea is as sure to be disappointing in the future as it has been in the past.”
A writer in the Brooklyn Citizen says:—
“Few people are aware of the extent of a peculiar kind of dissipation known as ginger-drinking. The article used is the essence of ginger, such as is put up in the several proprietary preparations known to the trade, or the alcohol extract ordinarily sold over the druggist’s counter. Having once acquired a liking for it, the victim becomes as much a slave to his appetite as the opium eater or the votary of cocaine. In its effect it is much the most injurious of all such practices, for in the course of time it destroys the coating of the stomach, and dooms its victim to a slow and agonizing death.
“The druggist who told me about the thing says that as ginger essence contains about one hundred per cent. alcohol, and whisky less than fifty per cent., the former is therefore twice as intoxicating. In fact, this is the reason why it is used by hardened old topers whose stomachs are no longer capable of intoxicating stimulation from whisky. They need the more powerful agency of the pure alcohol in the ginger extract. He told me that he had two regular customers, one a woman, who had ginger on several occasions for stomachic pains. The relief it afforded her was so grateful that she took it upon any recurrence of her trouble. She found, too, that the slight exhilaration of the alcohol banished mental depression. In this way she got to using it regularly, and finally to such excess that she was often grossly intoxicated. Large doses produce a quiet stupor; additional doses induce a profound lethargic slumber, which lasts in some cases for twenty-four hours. His other customer was a peddler, who came at a certain hour every morning, bought a four-ounce bottle and drank its contents by noon. The man craved the stuff so ardently that he was unable to go about his business until he set the machinery of his stomach in operation, and started the circulation of the blood by means of the fiery draught. He says that the habit is well known to the drug trade.”
“The morphia habit, the cocaine habit, the chloral habit, and other poison habits which are prevalent in this and other countries, are only different manifestations of a wide-spread and apparently increasing love for drugs which benumb or excite the nerves, which seems to characterize our modern civilization. Indeed, there appears to be, at the present time, almost a mania for the discovery of some new nerve-tickle, or some novel means of fuddling the senses. It is indeed high time that the medical profession raised, with one accord, its voice in solemn protest against the use of all nerve-obtunding and felicity-producing drugs, which are all, without exception, toxic agents, working mischief and only mischief in the human body.”—Dr. J. H. Kellogg.
Much discussion upon careless drug-taking has resulted from remarks made recently in London by Sir Frederick Treves, the King’s surgeon, at the opening of a hospital. He said that the time is fast approaching when physicians will give very little medicine, but will instead teach the people right methods of living so that sickness may be avoided.
Although there are some physicians who appear to enjoy the old routine of giving heroic doses of ill-tasting liquids, there
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