The dogma of human responsibility : more especially as it related to inebriety : being a paper read before the last annual meeting of the American Association for the Cure of Inebriates, and published in the September number of the Journal of Inebriety, 1877 / by the Rev. J. Willett.

  • Willett, J. (John), -1881.
Date:
1877
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The dogma of human responsibility : more especially as it related to inebriety : being a paper read before the last annual meeting of the American Association for the Cure of Inebriates, and published in the September number of the Journal of Inebriety, 1877 / by the Rev. J. Willett. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    consumed, the one being distilled from unmalted corn and rye and the other from malted grain or the fruit of the vine. Dr. Forbes Winslow states that a large percentage of frightful mental and brain disturbances can be traced to the drunkenness of parents, confirming the great physiological law, that ' like begets like.' Dr. Wood, of London, in his work on insanity, speaking on the subject of hereditary inebriety, says : Instances are sufficiently familiar, and several have occurred within my own personal knowledge, where the father having died at an early age from the effects of intemperance, has left a son to be brought up by those who have severely suffered from his excesses, and have therefore the strongest motives to pre- vent, if possible, a repetition of such misery; every pains has been taken to enforce sobriety, and yet, notwithstanding all precaution, the habits of the father have become those of the son, who, never having seen him from infancy, could not have adopted them from imitation. Everything was done to encourage habits of temperance, but all to no purpose; the seeds of the disease had begun to germinate ; a blind impulse led the doomed individual by successive and rapid stages along the same course which was fatal to the father, and which ere long terminated in his own destruction. Dr. Howe, in his report on idiocy to the Legislature of Massachusetts, states that three-fourths of all idiots are born of intemperate parents. Dr. Carpenter, of England, says: It is scarcely neces- sary to accumulate further proof in support of the assertion that of all the single causes of insanity habitual intemperance is the most potent. * * * ' We should expect to find that the offspring of habitual drunkards would share with those of lunatics in the predisposition to insanity. In numerous cases where the loss of reason has not over- taken the children of drunken parents, the impaired intel- lect and the various propensities which have been induced by