Responsibility in mental disease / by Henry Maudsley.

  • Henry Maudsley
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Responsibility in mental disease / by Henry Maudsley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    321/356 (page 285)
    If men took careful thought of the hest use which they could make of their bodies, they would probably never take alcohol except as the)' would take a dose of medicine, in order to serve some special purpose. It is idle to say that there is any real necessity for persons who are in good health to indulge in any kind of alcoholic liquor. At the best it is an indulgence which is unnecessary; at the worst, it is a vice which occasions infinite misery, sin, crime, madness, and disease. Short of the patent and undeniable ills which it is admitted on all hands to produce, it is at the bottom of manifold mischiefs that are never brought directly home to it. How much ill work would not be done, how much good work would be better done, but for its baneful inspiration ! Each act of crime, each suicide, each outbreak of madness, each disease, occasioned by it, means an infinite amount of suffering endured and inflicted before matters have reached that climax. It may of course be said that a moderate consump- tion of alcoholic liquors can do no harm, must on the contrary do good, when exhausted nature feels the need of some stimulant. I am not prepared to say that it does any demonstrable harm, but at the same time it is not wise to have recourse to an alcoholic stimulant when recourse ought to be had to food or rest; and it is a serious harm to the mind to gain, as is some- times done, by the factitious aid of a stimulant, the energy which should come from the calm resolution of a developed will. What one sees happen often enough in life is this: there are persons of anxious and sus-