On means for the prolongation of life.

  • Hermann David Weber
Date:
1908
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: On means for the prolongation of life. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    of crime and of the ruin, not only of the drinkers themselves, but of their families and their pro- geny. It is, as Lord Brougham said, the mother of want and the nurse of crime; it is the greatest of all preventable evils affecting the public health. A large percentage of epileptics, imbeciles, idiots, criminals, persons suffering from weak and early loss of memory and other mental deficiencies, melancholia, &c., is the progeny of intemperate persons. The mind is perverted by it, the love of home and family and the sense of veracity and morality are destroyed. The great and early mortality amongst public-house keepers is well known, and is so general amongst all those who are engaged in the liquor traffic that insurance offices either decline their lives, or take them only exceptionally, and then only at very high premiums. The records of insurance offices further show that the lives of total abstainers are longer than those of non-abstainers. Quite recently Sir T. P. Whitaker [138], in a carefully arranged paper read before the Life Assurance Medical Officers' Association (on January 6, 1904), has shown that, other things being equal, the abstainers from alcoholic beverages have a much lower mortality than the