The non-alcoholic treatment of disease / by John Higginbottom.

  • Higginbottom, John, 1788-1876.
Date:
1862[?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The non-alcoholic treatment of disease / by John Higginbottom. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    9/12 (page 8)
    8. The adage that “ wine is the milk of old age ” is very erroneous, as it regards our alcoholic wine ; it possesses no analogy to milk. Milk contains all the constituents of food, and is the type of food. Dr. Erasmus Darwin used to say, “ Milk is white blood.” The oldest individuals I have known have lived chiefly on milk and farinaceous food. Such food alone is sufficient to preserve the body in a healthy, cheerful, and happy state. Alcoholic wine is not at all adapted to support or repair the decaying body in old age, but to exhaust the vital powers, produce disease and death. 9. There is a subject with which I have been much impressed, that is, the great and fearful responsibility in ordering or prescribing by medical men, alcohol as a medicine, particularly to delicate females. From my own observation, the effects have been most calamitous in producing confirmed drunkenness. The very slow, insidious, pleasing, and delusive manner in its attack is such, in the commencement, that the patient is totally unconscious of her state. On visiting a lady, I perceived she did not articulate her words distinctly, and on inquiry, she told me she had been taking brandy and water. I thought it right to inform her that, if any neighbour were to see her in the state she was in, it would be said that she was intoxicated. She directly said, “ If I thought so, Mr. Higginbottom, I would never take a drop again as long as I live.” Such an amiable character never expects to come on the- list of drunkards. I have known some of the most truthful, beautiful, and excellent mothers and wives arrive at such a state of intemperance as to become a burden to their families and outcasts of society, in a lost state, from which there is no recovery. What compensation can a medical man make for being the cause of such a calamity ? I have been called to a lady dead drunk, when her husband lias been under the greatest apprehension of her dying. On the fol¬ lowing day the poor inebriate stoutly denied to me that she was ever intoxicated in her life, and that “ she only took a little to do her good.” I never knew a lady yet who acknowledged that she had taken too much. The non-alcoholic treatment is equally successful in surgical as well as medical cases. I have found that, by abandoning the alcoholic treatment, acute disease is much more readily cured, and chronic disease much more manageable. I have never seen or known a patient injured by leaving off alcoholic fluids at once. I should as soon expect “killing a horse, by leaving off the whip or the spur.” I have not heard from my professional brethren or any of my patients that my non-alcoholic treatment of disease has occasioned a single death ; my greatest trouble has been for many years in preventing patients from being destroyed by the use of alcohol—-