A botanic guide to health and the natural pathology of disease / [Albert Isaiah Coffin].
- Albert Isaiah Coffin
- Date:
- 1846
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: A botanic guide to health and the natural pathology of disease / [Albert Isaiah Coffin]. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![|| country, by its being constantly used by the faculty as a medicine, and recommended as a beverage to their patients. The custom has so much increased, and the | appetite for strong drinks gained such an ascendancy, that despite the efor of the temperance advocates, though Father Mathew and others have accomplished much, by way of mora] reclamation, as well in Ireland as this country, yet so long as doctors administer it as a medicine, the fearful effects of drunkenness must be felt and endured. | | Dr. Cheyne, of Dublin, in his ‘* Letter on Wine and Spirits,” many years ago, justly observed, “ that. the benefits which have been supposed to flow from their liberal use in medicine, and especially in those diseases which were once universally, and are still vulgarly supposed to depend upon mere weakness, have | invested these agents with attributes to which they | have no claim; and hence, as we physicians no longer | employ them as we were wont to do, we ought not to rest satisfied with a mere acknowledgement of error, || | but we ought also to make every retribution in our || power for having so long upheld one of the most fatal | delusions, which ever took possession of the human mind.” The celebrated Dr. Abernethy was once said to have | been asked if he believed that alcoholic drinks were good for the animal economy, when he replied, ‘‘ that they were bad and injurious in every instance, no matter | for whatever purpose administered.’ His interrogator asked if he told his patients so? ‘O no, God forbid,” remarked the Doctor, ‘Simere I to do that, I should | lose one-third of my income.’ . ‘Most of the doctors who recommend wine and. somes | to their patients, do so because the system having || been reduced ks.by. illness, something in the form of a H](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b29320641_0089.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
