Modern medical opinions on alcohol : being a series of lectures delivered by well-known medical men.
- Date:
- [1911?]
Licence: In copyright
Credit: Modern medical opinions on alcohol : being a series of lectures delivered by well-known medical men. Source: Wellcome Collection.
11/160
![ALCOHOL: A POISON. [By Sir Frederick Treves, Bart., G.C.V.O., LL.D., &e.] Sir Frederick Treves, in the course of an address delivered at the Church House, Westminster, under the auspices of the Women’s Union, Church of England Temperance Society, said: “I do not propose to trouble you with any detailed accounts of the effects of excessive drinking, and the lamentable diseases that follow from it. The train of physical wreckage that lies in the wake of drunkenness is, unfortunately, a matter of only too common knowledge. I should like, rather, to occupy your time for ten minutes in dealing with the effect of alcohol on the body generally. The point with regard to alcohol is simple enough. It is a poison, and it is a poison which, like other poisons, has certain uses; but the limitations in the use of alcohol should be as strict as the limitations in the use of any other kind of poison. Moreover, it is an insidious poison, in that it produces effects which seem to have only one antidote — alcohol again. This applies to another drug equally insidious, and that is morphia, or opium. Unfortun- ately, the term poison is by no means an exaggerated one, when it is realised that with alcohol, as drunk by many of the poorer classes, there is apt to be mixed a very definite poison in the form of fusel oil. Diminishing Medical Use. There is no disguising the fact that alcohol is of later years less used by the medical profession. It has a certain position as a medicine; that no one will dispute. But looking](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b28052808_0011.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
