Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - Martha Meir Allen (readict books txt) 📗

fruit ices, sugared tea, etc., concerning which hundreds of investigations have demonstrated positively that it prevents the waste of both albumen and fat. As a stimulant I employ, besides hydriatic methods, which at the same time abstract heat, almost nothing but camphor, and I can affirm that it is unconditionally preferable to alcohol for its prompt results and the absence of disagreeable after-effects (intoxication, benumbing). Pneumonia, especially, subsides without alcohol to perfect satisfaction, and I rejoice to agree in this respect with Aufrecht, one of the best authorities on this disease, who in his monograph in Nothnagle’s manual, acknowledges himself hostile to the use of alcohol in the treatment of pneumonia, and hopes that its use may be speedily abolished. For the reasons previously specified, I should like to see that extended to all use of alcohol in therapeutics. However, that can come to pass only when all thinking physicians clearly appreciate the fact that no substance is able to undertake the double role of a food and a poison, and, also, that for alcohol no nutritive, but only toxic properties can be claimed.”—Max Kassowitz, M. D., Professor in the University of Vienna, Austria.

“Besides its deleterious influence on the nervous system and other important parts of our body, alcohol has a harmful action on the phagocytes, the agents of natural defense against infective microbes.”—Prof. Metchnikoff, Pasteur Institute, Paris, France.

“Alcoholic liquors are, to my mind, not only not valuable, but distinctly disadvantageous, in the treatment of disease, except in rare instances, as for example in the initial chill of some acute infectious disease. However, I have almost given up the use of alcohol in the treatment of disease.”—Dr. D. L. Edsall, Professor of Therapeutics in the University of Pennsylvania Medical School.

“As a rule which might well be regarded as universal in the practice of medicine, alcohol in the treatment of disease is an evil. In ordinary doses and in continuous use the sum of its reactions increases exhaustion, which may terminate fatally.”—Dr. John Van Duyn, Professor of Medicine in Syracuse, N. Y., University Medical School.

“In sixteen years of active practice I have not used alcoholics at all. I am medical director of the Scranton Sanitarium, and I have considerable trouble in trying to cure those who use alcohol, and to undo some of the work my fellow practitioners have unwittingly made.”—D. Webster Evans, M. D., Scranton, Pa.

“I am opposed to the use of alcoholic liquors as a beverage, and with rare exceptions, to their use in the treatment of diseases.”—Dr. Eugene Kerr, Physician to Phipps Dispensary, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, Md.

“In my professional work I do not advise or permit the use of alcohol as a beverage or medicine in any form whatever. No alcohol is used medicinally in my hospital wards. Beer or wine is not permitted to convalescents. Children are never given tinctures. Cases of delirium tremens receive no alcohol. The hypodermic use of alcohol is not permitted in cases of shock. There are other much more effective and less depressing diffusable stimulants.

“Among my colleagues the employment of alcohol as a medicine has diminished at least seventy-five per cent. in the past fifteen years.

“I have cast it out entirely.”—J. P. Warbasse, M. D., Chief Surgeon German Hospital, Brooklyn, N. Y.

“The habitual use of alcohol in any disease is worse than harmful.”—Robert B. Preble, M. D., Chicago, Ill.

“The last few years I find I have used less and less alcohol in prescribing for my patients until at the present time I use very little. I think my typhoid cases do better without alcohol than with it.”—H. H. Healy, M. D., former Sec’y North Dakota Board of Health.

“Alcohol is a poison. It is claimed by some that alcohol is a food. If so, it is a poisoned food.”—Frederick Peterson, M. D., Professor of Psychiatry, Columbia University, N. Y.

“Few physicians now credit alcohol as a food (that is, as a tissue builder) or as having any valuable medicinal qualities. In fact, it is considered by many to have a destructive rather than a constructive quality. I believe it should never be put into the human body.”—Eugene Hubbell, M. D., St. Paul, Minn.

“The medical profession is learning that alcohol has been much abused in the treatment of the sick, and is largely discarding it. I hardly find occasion to prescribe it once a year.”—W. A. Plecker, M. D., Sec’y State Board of Health, Hampton, Va.

“The use of alcohol as a beverage or therapeutically, is in either case a habit of the user. The stimulation is but temporary, the reaction leaving the nerve cells of the individual with less resisting power than before the ingestion of alcohol. * * * Never permit a verbal or written prescription of yours to give rise to the use of a habit forming drug.”—From a lecture to students in Omaha Medical College by J. M. Aiken, M. D., Clinical Instructor and Lecturer upon Nervous and Mental Diseases.

“The use of spirits as a stimulant in diseases, except in a very limited circle, is a mere empiricism for which no good reasons can be given. The teachings of medical men are no more to be followed blindly and without question. The tests of alcohol as a tonic, as a food, as a stimulant, as a retarder of waste, are all negative. There is no reliable evidence to support these claims, but a constant accumulation of facts to indicate the danger from the use of spirits. To give alcohol or any other drug without some rational theory in accord with the scientific researches of to-day is unpardonable.”—Dr. T. D. Crothers, Hartford, Conn., Editor of the Journal of Inebriety.

“Many physicians prescribe alcohol only because it is the desire of the patient, and because patients refuse medicine which the physicians would rather use.”—Everett Hooper, M. D. Boston, Mass.

“You are right in indicting alcohol for its insidious wrongs to humanity. It is an old and sly offender and very much the ‘mocker’ in medical practise that it has been pronounced in holy writ. It exhausts the latent energy of the organism often when that power is most needed to conserve the failing strength of the body in the battle with disease.”—Dr. C. H. Hughes, St. Louis, Missouri.

“The best class of thinkers, men of the best intellectual gauge, are those who are doing away with this miserable, unscientific practise of giving liquor.”—Dr. Boynton, Clifton Springs, N. Y.

“I believe that in the scientific light of the present era alcohol should be classed among the anæsthetics and poisons, and that the human family would be benefited by its entire exclusion from the field of remedial agents.”—Dr. J. S. Cain, Dean of the Faculty, Medical Department, University of the South, Sewanee, Tenn.

“Let me cite my experience in surgery for the last three years in proof of the uselessness of alcohol, and the benefit of abstinence from its administration. During that time I have performed more than one thousand operations, a large portion upon cases of railroad injuries, one hundred for appendicitis, and in none of these was alcohol administered in any form, either before, during, or after operations. I defy any one who still adheres to alcohol to show as good results. Equally gratifying results have been obtained with my medical cases, and I fail to understand how any observing and thinking physician can still cling to so prejudicial a drug as alcohol, when he has within his reach a multitude of valuable, exact, and reliable methods for combating, governing, and controlling disease.”—Dr. Evan C. Kane, Surgeon Pennsylvania Railroad, Kane, Pa.

“In my neurological practice I emphatically forbid my patients the use of alcohol. This poison has a special predilection for the nervous system which it influences sometimes to an alarming extent.”—Alfred Gordon, M. D., Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, Pa.

“Alcohol finds no place in my remedial list. It has been banished, not from sentiment, but from knowledge secured by scientific investigation.”—T. Alexander MacNicholl, M. D., New York City, one of the founders of the Red Cross Hospital, New York.

“No sound, scientific argument can be offered for the medical use of alcohol, either internally or externally. It is a toxic substance which ought to be retired from the materia medica, and placed in the catalog of obsolete drugs along with tobacco, lobelia, and like useless but highly toxic drug substances.”—Dr. J. H. Kellogg, Superintendent Battle Creek Sanitarium, Battle Creek, Michigan.

“The majority of medical men, without making any searching investigation into the abundant recent literature upon the subject of alcohol, are disposed to regard it with less and less favor as the years go by, while those who have closely followed the thorough investigations into the physiological action of alcohol recently made by scientists, have repudiated it altogether. * * * It is a lack of information upon this subject—together with the fact that alcohol has been used as a therapeutic agent for hundreds of years, during which it has formed the basis of all tonic or stimulating treatment—that gives alcohol its present hold upon a part of the medical profession.”—John Madden, M. D., Portland, Oregon, formerly professor in Milwaukee Medical College.

“Alcohol may fill an emergency when better means are not at hand, but, apart from this, I know of no use in the practise of medicine and surgery for which we have not better weapons at our command. There is but one reason for the continued use of alcohol—men use it because they love it.” Dr. W. F. Waugh, Chicago, Editor Journal of Clinical Medicine.

“If alcohol had become a candidate for recognition years ago instead of centuries ago it is safe to say that its application in medicine would have been very much more limited than we find it at the present time. Its wide therapeutic use is to be attributed in part to fallacies and misconception regarding its pharmacology, and in part to a disinclination on the part of the average practitioner of medicine to depart from old and well-beaten lines.”—Winfield S. Hall, M. D., Professor of Physiology, Northwestern University Medical School, Chicago.

“In its relation to the human system, alcohol is never constructive and always destructive.”—Prof. Frank Woodbury, M. D., Philadelphia, Pa.

“The clinicians who decide for the deleterious action of alcohol in infectious conditions have what evidence of an experimental nature we possess at the present time to support their impressions. The advocates of the continuous use of the drug have this evidence against them.”—Henry F. Hewes, M. D., Harvard Medical School, Boston, Mass.

“I am very glad that you are undertaking so important a work as this in connection with the terrible problem of alcoholism. Physicians need awakening in this matter; they need reform. The evil results of alcohol are unfortunately brought to my notice each day of my life as I pursue my vocation and my public duties as Health Officer, and a reform in prescribing so as to eliminate alcohol would undoubtedly have far-reaching beneficent effects.”—Edward von Adelung, M. D., Health Officer, Oakland, Cal.

“I am forwarding you a report of 303 cases of typhoid fever treated without alcohol, and my reasons for not using it. I believe the results will not suffer by comparison with those obtained in other hospitals where alcohol is used. Wishing you lasting success in your war upon the greatest evil of the times.”—J. H. Landis, M. D., Cincinnati, O.

“Only precise evidence that it (alcohol) is able to protect albumen from destruction can warrant its employment and establish its value as a food in the sick diet. And this evidence which is of determinative importance must be looked upon as having failed, according to the recent investigations of Stammreich and Miura (who both worked under von Noorden’s direction), as well as by Schmidt, Schöneseiffen and Roseman. The uniform result of all these experiments, arrived at