Religious and educational aspects of temperance / by various authors.

Date:
[1874?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Religious and educational aspects of temperance / by various authors. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    ukeii, and tliat as far as appeared anyone might take two ounces with- out damage ; but it would appear that three ounces is the lowest limit to which°our moderate drinkers in many cases condescend to come. Well, I venture to make this statement, that, although there are thou- sands of moderate drinkers who do keep within the limits ol what any physiologist would call temperance ; that is to say, they do not lose iheir reason, they do not confuse or stupefy their brains by the excessive use of this poison, still there are many—and I won’t give the percentage, because I don’t want to be thought uncharitable—who are in the habit of drinking moderately, who once a-year, or once in their lifetime, do get beyond the limit of moderate drinking into what physiologists would call drunkenness. (Laughter.) A total abstainer cannot do that without ceasiDg to be a total abstainer. We can shake ourselves free entirely from all connection with this sin—not that we are sinless, the Lord knoweth, but in regard to this sin we have no participation in it. I was going to make this observation in regard to the two ounces—viz., the thought has been expressed repeatedly that within that limit there is no marked appearance of mischief. Now do not all physicians know that there is soil required as well as seed in order to the manifestation of disease : that not only must you have the particular exciting cause brought to bear upon the patient, but also that there must be a preparedness and an adaptation within the body for that exciting cause, and that in a great many instances you have the seeds of disease or the exciting causes of disease present, and yet because the patient who sub- jects himself to these causes has no soil to give the seed lodgment he escapes unharmed. We venture to say, as Sir Henry Thompson has already said in his celebrated letter, that moderate drinking is one of the most frightful preparers of the soil: that it does it perhaps insensibly, but surely, gradually, not perceptibly, because slowly and steadily the soil is being produced into which the seed in due time falling manifests its power by its destructive harvest and fruitage. (Cheers.) Now, that can only be avoided by our ceasing to use these drinks. I wonder our sanitary reformers have not thought of this. (Hear, hear.) Some of them have. I do not mean to say, for instance, that Dr. Richardson has not done so—(cheers)—but while they are taking so much care in other directions to secure us against infectious disease, why should they not endeavour to extirpate the preparedness into which the seeds fall and spring up to yield such awful and such abundant returns? “ But,” it is said, “ there is no apparent mischief done by two ounces daily.” I found a very curious thing the other day in the Lancet, which is one of the oldest and most respectable of our journals. If I recollect rightly, many of the medical papers not many years ago said that we ought not to reason upon anything within those limits of 2 ozs., because nothing within them could do harm ; only where it begins to show marked harm have we any right to call in question the usefulness of the substance taken. You know that only a few days ago the question was raised as to the rightfulness or wrongfulness of the adulteration of certain substances with salts of copper. These salts give a beautiful green colour to the article, and make it look much more palatable than it would other-
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