Alcohol at the bar : the highest medical and scientific testimony concerning its use / compiled by G.W. Bacon.

Date:
[between 1880 and 1889?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Alcohol at the bar : the highest medical and scientific testimony concerning its use / compiled by G.W. Bacon. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Free Hospital, and the North London Hospital for Con- sumption, writes as follows :—“I know very well that the late Dr. Anstie and other energetic followers of the late Dr. Todd, of London, are wont to look upon alcohol as one of the best kinds of food for overworked literary men; and in a journal, The Practitioner, I recently saw that the editor (Dr. Anstie) talked of the utility of such persons habitually partaking of a daily bottle of Bordeaux wine ; but I cannot, in any way, say that I understand the rationale of such advice. It seems to me that simple food and simple beve- rages give to the human animal all that is required for the building up of the tissues, with as little disturbance as possible of the circulation. At first, when any one, not habituated to the use of beer, wine, or spirits, partakes of any of these, the patient feels giddy and uncomfortable: the pulse rises in frequency, the head becomes hot, and the cheeks flushed. Will any medical man assert that such effects are those we should wish to arouse habitually by our daily diet P I think not. It is custom which dulls the sensibility to these noxious effects of stimulants on our nervous system ; but is it worth the while of any of us to become less sensitive to such poisons V’ Dr. James Edmunds, in controverting a statement by the Bishop of Manchester, said :—“ It in no way follows that alcoholics—assuming them to be gifts of God—were or- dained to be used as food for mankind. Arsenic is as much a gift of God as any other purely natural object, but does it follow that arsenic was ordained for our use as food be- cause it may properly be called ‘ the gift of a beneficent Creator?’* Clearly not. Not only is this reasoning alto- gether fallacious, but the reasoning itself is grounded upon a statement which is not true. Alcoholic liquors are no more ‘the gifts of a beneficent Creator,’ than are murderous weapons or chemical poisons; alcohol is never found in the animal, vegetable, or mineral kingdom; alcohol is produced only by the artificial destruction of the saccharine principle offood, and it is always a product of man’s contrivance. Nor is there anywhere a shadow of a priori
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