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.

    22/172 (page 18)
    None, too, will deny that continued intemperate drink- ing destroys vast numbers; but the great majority of our countrymen firmly believe that limited daily drink- ing is perfectly harmless. Well, suppose we adopt as a standard of moderation (and moderate drinking has never yet been clearly defined) two glasses of port or sherry, or one glass of brandy—this is equivalent to 1 ounce of alcohol. Now, from a very careful and ex- tended series of experiments on healthy adult soldiers, Professor Parkes and Count Wollowicz found that 1 ounce of alcohol made the heart beat 4300 times more daily. As at each beat 6 ounces of blood are lifted up by the two ventricles of the heart, nearly a ton weight, by solid measure, is thus added to the ordinary quantity the heart has to pump up every day. If we take the lowest estimate which has been made of the daily work of the heart as equal to 122 tons lifted a foot high, the moderate drinking of two glasses of wine or one glass of spirits compels the heart to do daily work in excess equal to the person having to raise tons one foot, and the extremely moderate indulgence in a single glass of sherry or port causes a daily overwork equal to If tons lifted as far.” This is the article which has obtained such a direful increase in its consumption. Let us glance one moment at the moral effects of this shadowing upas tree. It is slowly transmuting merry England into a great valley of death. Remember that those arrested for drunkenness do not furnish one-tithe • of the existing drunkards, and then try to hear unmoved