The history of the first inebriate asylum in the world / by its founder [Jonathan Edward Turner]. An account of his indictment, also a sketch of the Woman's national hospital, by its founder.

Turner, J. Edward, 1822-1889.

Date:: 1888

Credit: The history of the first inebriate asylum in the world / by its founder [Jonathan Edward Turner]. An account of his indictment, also a sketch of the Woman's national hospital, by its founder. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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$wliolh' aw a iiiisfortime. It is a fact, to be investigated in all its sources, and met in eveiy shape and by every method. Education and religion must be depended on, because they not only tend to correct the evils which they help to create, but all other evils through their light, and the moral power and divine sanctions that inhere in them; but education and religion have their own mistakes; and in this country, before intemperance can be brought within tolerable limits, we have yet to learn from education and religion, the means of moderating the haste to be rich, the exclusive devotion to business, the ignorance of an attractive domestic and social life, the community of the old and the \'oung in their amuse- ments, the extinction of our intense social ambition,—which at present waste the nervous life, create horrible dyspepsia, plant chronic excitability of all the functions of the body and soul, and make the seeds of drunkenness hei*editarv in the constitution of the people. The immensity of the cause of our national intemperance ought not to drive us to despair; on the contrary it should excite in us a lively sympathy with any and all the means that are now employed to prevent or to cure it. The efforts which a (luarter of a century have witnes sed in this reforma- tion are almost imparallellcd in dignity and importance. God knows where we should have been without them. But all these efforts leave us with this vast amount of inebriety on our hands. And whatever success may attend the efforts at prevention, I think it cannot bedonbted that an immense sum of drunkenness will and mnst still be left to cure. It is unnecessary to describe the evil of drunkenness, either for its victim or those who suffer with him. AVe are unha])] )ily too intimately ac(pmiiited with the dreadful wrecks it occasions to make any descri])tion of its ruins important to this argument. Adove writhing in the talons (^f an eagle, a lamb in the folds of a ser])ent, is not so affecting a s])ectacle as a human soul in the ])ower of intem])erance. That horrible fate, before which the heroes and heroines of the old cla: tragedy succumbed, or that iron hou.se of the Inquisition, moving its horrid .walls day by day an inch nearer to its cag(Ml victim, and in the end cru.shing with remor.sele.ss but protracted cruelty, are not too dreadful images of the power$