The science temperance text-book : in relation to morals, chemistry, physiology, criticism, and history / [Frederic Richard Lees].

  • Frederic Richard Lees
Date:
1884-
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The science temperance text-book : in relation to morals, chemistry, physiology, criticism, and history / [Frederic Richard Lees]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Remedial treatment must be directed in order to be. successful. Dr Albert Day, of Boston, U.S., says :— “One of the chief predisposing causes of inebriety is CIVILIZATION, entailing, as it does, in its modem development, so great an expen¬ diture of nerve-force. Atmospheric influence is another undoubted exciting cause of this affection, a paroxysm, for example, being caused by exposure to sea air or easterly winds. It has been said that there is an inborn element in the nature of man which develops inebriety. Could we trace the cause of this, we should find that the whole [American] race is tainted with this disease, coming down to us through the ages, in obedience to the laws of heredity. Our fathers, from earliest history, were addicted to drunkenness.” The important truth in this statement is, that excessive expenditure of nervous power in one generation—and all continuous unnatural expenditure comes to be excessive— entails a less vitative constitution on our posterity. We cannot transmit what we do not possess. The disease is a negation—want of life, in which the subject of the want seeks life, ‘more life,’ by recourse to the first stimulus at hand which will make him feel ‘alive,’ or the first narcotic that will make him not feel his defect of life. It is this double feeling—the desire for ‘ life,’ the disgust of ‘ lowness ’— which constitutes the mental disease, and it is surely created by one generation and inherited by another. It is not an ‘ inborn element,’ but a generated defect in the parent, and an inherited defect in the child. As to ‘civilization,’ that is a mere word—a collective-abstraction, perfectly meaning¬ less, and therefore partially misleading. It is something in a state of ‘ civilization ’ that must be the actual agency out of which the tendency to inebriety comes. What is that but the action of the drink ? It is another thing alto¬ gether to ascertain what is the cause (or what are the conditions) which induce people to take the drink. That will be discussed in our chapter on the Philosophy of the Remedy. Looking back at this mere sketch of the History of drinking amongst the nations of the world, it is no high coloured rhetoric to affirm that of all the curses that ever
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