Danger; Or, Wounded in the House of a Friend Part 17

"Some; not a great deal. The subject is one of the most perplexing and difficult we have to deal with."

"You cla.s.s intemperance with diseases, do you not?"

"Yes; certain forms of it. It may be hereditary or acquired like any other disease. One man may have a pulmonary, another a bilious and another a dypso-maniac diathesis, and an exposure to exciting causes in one case is as fatal to health as in the other. If there exist a predisposition to consumption, the disease will be developed under peculiar morbific influences which would have no deleterious effect upon a subject not so predisposed. The same law operates as unerringly in the inherited predisposition to intemperance. Let the man with a dypso-maniac diathesis indulge in the use of intoxicating liquors, and he will surely become a drunkard. There is no more immunity for him than for the man who with tubercles in his lungs exposes himself to cold, bad air and enervating bodily conditions."

"A more serious view of the case, doctor, than is usually taken."

"I know, but a moment's consideration--to say nothing of observed facts--will satisfy any reasonable man of its truth."

"What do you mean by dypso-mania as a medical term?"

"The word," replied Dr. Angier, "means crazy for drink, and is used in the profession to designate that condition of alcoholic disease in which the subject when under its influence has no power of self-control. It is characterized by an inordinate and irresistible desire for alcoholic liquors, varying in intensity from a slight departure from a normal appet.i.te to the most depraved and entire abandonment to its influence. When this disease becomes developed, its action upon the brain is to deteriorate its quality and impair its functions. All the faculties become more or less weakened. Reason, judgment, perception, memory and understanding lose their vigor and capacity. The will becomes powerless before the strong propensity to drink. The moral sentiments and affections likewise become involved in the general impairment. Conscience, the feeling of accountability, the sense of right and wrong, all become deadened, while the pa.s.sions are aroused and excited."

"What an awful disease!" exclaimed one of the listeners.

"You may well call it an awful disease," returned the doctor, who, under the influence of a few gla.s.ses of wine, was more inclined to talk than usual. "It has been named the mother of diseases. Its death-roll far outnumbers that of any other. When it has fairly seized upon a man, no influence seems able to hold him back from the indulgence of his pa.s.sion for drink. To gratify this desire he will disregard every consideration affecting his standing in society, his pecuniary interests and his domestic relations, while the most frightful instances of the results of drinking have no power to restrain him. A hundred deaths from this cause, occurring under the most painful and revolting circ.u.mstances, fail to impress him with a sense of his own danger. His understanding will be clear as to the cases before him, and he will even condemn the self-destructive acts which he sees in others, but will pa.s.s, as it were, over the very bodies of these victims, without a thought of warning or a sense of fear, in order to gratify his own ungovernable propensity. Such is the power of this terrible malady."

"Has the profession found a remedy?"

"No; the profession is almost wholly at fault in its treatment. There are specialists connected with insane and reformatory inst.i.tutions who have given much attention to the subject, but as yet we have no recorded line of treatment that guarantees a cure."

"Except," said one of his listeners, "the remedy of entire abstinence from drinks in which alcohol is present."

The doctor gave a shrug:

"You do not cure a thirsty man by withholding water."

His mind was a little clouded by the wine he had taken.

"The thirsty man's desire for water is healthy; and if you withhold it, you create a disease that will destroy him," was answered. "Not so the craving for alcohol. With every new supply the craving is increased, and the man becomes more and more helpless in the folds of an enslaving appet.i.te. Is it not true, doctor, that with few exceptions all who have engaged in treating inebriates agree that only in entire abstinence is cure possible?"

"Well, yes; you are probably right there," Dr. Angler returned, with some professional reserve. "In the most cases isolation and abstinence are no doubt the only remedies, or, to speak more correctly, the only palliatives. As for cure, I am one of the skeptics. If you have the diathesis, you have the danger of exposure always, as in consumption."

"An occasion like this," remarked the other, "is to one with a dypso-maniac diathesis like a draft of cold, damp air on the exposed chest of a delicate girl who has the seeds of consumption in her lungs.

Is it not so, doctor?"

"Yes, yes."

"There are over three hundred persons here to-night."

"Not less."

"In so large a company, taking society as we have it to-day, is it likely that we have none here with a hereditary or acquired love of drink?"

"Scarcely possible," replied Dr. Angier.

"How large do you think the percentage?"

"I have no means of knowing; but if we are to judge by the large army of drunkards in the land, it must be fearfully great."

"Then we cannot invite to our houses fifty or a hundred guests, and give them as much wine and spirits as they care to drink, without seriously hurting some of them. I say nothing of the effect upon unvitiated tastes; I refer only to those with diseased appet.i.tes who made happen to be present."

"It will be bad for them, certainly. Such people should stay at home."

And saying this, Dr. Angier turned from the two gentlemen to speak with a professional friend who came toward him at the moment.

CHAPTER XII.

"THE doctor likes his gla.s.s of wine," remarked one of the gentlemen as Dr. Angier left them.

"Is that so?"

"Didn't you observe his heightened color and the gleam in his eyes?"

"I noticed something unusual in his manner, but did not think it the effect of wine."

"He is a reticent man, with considerable of what may be called professional dignity, and doesn't often let himself down to laymen as he did just now."

"There wasn't much letting down, that I could see."

"Perhaps not; but professional pride is reserved and sensitive in some persons. It hasn't much respect for the opinions of non-experts, and is chary of discussion with laymen. Dr. Angier is weak, or peculiar if you please, in this direction. I saw that he was annoyed at your reply to his remark that you do not cure a thirsty man by withholding water. It was a little thing, but it showed his animus. The argument was against him, and it hurt his pride. As I said, he likes his gla.s.s of wine, and if he does not take care will come to like it too well. A doctor has no more immunity from dypso-mania than his patient. The former may inherit or acquire the disease as well as the latter."

"How does the doctor know that he has not from some ancestor this fatal diathesis? Children rarely if ever betray to their children a knowledge of the vices or crimes of their parents. The death by consumption, cancer or fever is a part of oral family history, but not so the death from intemperance. Over that is drawn a veil of silence and secresy, and the children and grandchildren rarely if ever know anything about it. There may be in their blood the taint of a disease far more terrible than cancer or consumption, and none to give them warning of the conditions under which its development is certain."

"Is it not strange," was replied, "that, knowing as Dr. Angier certainly does, from what he said just now, that in all cla.s.ses of society there is a large number who have in their physical const.i.tutions the seeds of this dreadful disease--that, as I have said, knowing this, he should so frequently prescribe wine and whisky to his patients?"

"It is a little surprising. I have noticed, now that you speak of it, his habit in this respect."

"He might as well, on his own theory, prescribe thin clothing and damp air to one whose father or mother had died of consumption as alcoholic stimulants to one, who has the taint of dypso-mania in his blood. In one case as in the other the disease will almost surely be developed.

This is common sense, and something that can be understood by all men."

"And yet, strange to say, the very men who have in charge the public health, the very men whose business it is to study the relations between cause and effect in diseases, are the men who in far too many instances are making the worst possible prescriptions for patients in whom even the slightest tendency to inebriety may exist hereditarily.

We have, to speak plainly, too many whisky doctors, and the harm they are doing is beyond calculation. A physician takes upon himself a great responsibility when, without any knowledge of the antecedents of a patient or the stock from which he may have come, he prescribes whisky or wine or brandy as a stimulant. I believe thousands of drunkards have been made by these unwise prescriptions, against which I am glad to know some of the most eminent men in the profession, both in this country and Europe, have entered a solemn protest."

"There is one thing in connection with the disease of intemperance,"

replied the other, "that is very remarkable. It is the only one from which society does not protect itself by quarantine and sanitary restrictions. In cholera, yellow fever and small-pox every effort is made to guard healthy districts from their invasion, and the man who for gain or any other consideration should be detected in the work of introducing infecting agents would be execrated and punished. But society has another way of dealing with the men who are engaged in spreading the disease of intemperance among the people. It enacts laws for their protection, and gives them the largest liberty to get gain in their work of disseminating disease and death, and, what is still more remarkable, actually sells for money the right to do this."

"You put the case sharply."

"Too sharply?"

"Perhaps not. No good ever comes of calling evil things by dainty names or veiling hard truth under mild and conservative phrases. In granting men a license to dispense alcohol in every variety of enticing forms and in a community where a large percentage of the people have a predisposition to intemperance, consequent as well on hereditary taint as unhealthy social conditions, society commits itself to a disastrous error the fruit of which is bitterer to the taste than the ashen core of Dead Sea apples."

"What about Dead Sea apples?" asked Mr. Elliott, who came up at the moment and heard the last remark. The two gentlemen were pew-holders in his church. Mr. Elliott's countenance was radiant. All his fine social feelings were active, and he was enjoying a "flow of soul," if not "a feast of reason." Wine was making glad his heart--not excess of wine, in the ordinary sense, for Mr. Elliott had no morbid desire for stimulants. He was of the number who could take a social gla.s.s and not feel a craving for more. He believed in wine as a good thing, only condemning its abuse.