Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Dr. Bucknill on drunkards. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.
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![with the tarnished fringe of drunken society, while its broad expanse is a funereal pall to myriads of lowly victims ; and Dalrym pie’s Com- mittee, with its foregone conclusion, unwittingly established the dread- ful fact of alcoholic eremacausis in our swarming cities, and con- cluded by recommending a most dangerous and unconstitutional change in the law for the supposed benefit of those classes of society in which a drunkard is becoming a somewhat rare specimen of a de- caying and dishonored vice. They made out the charge fully against the common folk, at least in certain localities, and they directed the main force of their proposed remedy against the stragglers and back- sliders of the sober classes. They would scarify the field with a chain harrow when it stands in urgent need of deep draining and subsoiling. Dr. Peddie, to give him his just due, has not altogether passed on the other side from the drunken crowd, for in his evidence before the Committee he proposed the establishment for the whole of Scotland of four public inebriate asylums, each to contain forty patients of the working classes. They were to be model insti- tutions. He admitted that all four would not contain the habitual drunkards of Edinburgh alone, and, indeed, he may any day find nearly twice as many of the gentle sex in Queensberry House. But it was honourable to him, considering the example of some of his co- agitators, that he allowed his mind to dwell for a moment upon the treatment of drunkards who cannot pay. Public provision for the treatment of 160 working-class drunkards for the whole of Scotland, and for the idle class drunkards as many private houses of detention as the law of profitable investment, aided by that of “ compulsory ar- rest,” may develope, reminds one of the proportions of Falstaffs bread and sack, in the relative regard for the class which represents the staff of life, and that which drinks the wine of its wealth and luxury. Dr. Peddie also suggests [see Appendix of “ Report on Drunkards,” p. 187,] that “ the pauper class of drunkards should be taken care of “ in the separate wards of a poor-house,” and that u the criminal “ drunkard class should be accommodated in wards or separate houses “ connected with our chief prisons.” “ By these arrangements,” he thinks, “ the unhappy individuals would have more chance of benefit “ from a distinct and more attractive system of treatment.” In these separate wards, to be called Reformatories, work is “ to be tl made both agreeable and profitable by a system of rewards and bene- “ fits.” For the rich drunkard the loss of liberty is to be sweetened by manifold attractions, of which “ not the least would be perfection uin the culinary department” and “ such new and relishable enjoyments 11 as might counteract or take the place of craving for alcoholic u stimulants.” All this, indeed, is philanthropy and not science, not even social science. Perhaps it is not even “ non-professional common sense,” for we should all wish to be inebriates that we might enjoy ourselves under the protection of Dr. Peddie’s wing, and he might become the](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22366775_0008.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
