The effects of alcohol as a medicine : an essay read before the Fifth National Convention, held at Saratoga, August 1, 2, and 3, 1865 / by Charles Jewett, M.D.

  • Jewett, Charles, 1807-1879.
Date:
1865
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The effects of alcohol as a medicine : an essay read before the Fifth National Convention, held at Saratoga, August 1, 2, and 3, 1865 / by Charles Jewett, M.D. 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.)

    2/8
    disease, constantly multiplying througli the united influence of hereditary taint and bad personal habits, is necessarily empirical or experimental. Medicine can not yet be reckoned among the exact sciences, and the very respectable class of gentlemen who study, profess, and practice it, Avhile feeling their way, not always with sufficient care, toward the truth or toward a true preventive or remedial system, are influenced like other men by popular opinion and fashion. They have their professional fashions or hobbies, and these follow each other in pretty regular succession. Almost every potent drug has, within the last two centuries, enjoyed its season of excessive popularity. In process of time it is compelled to yield the club to the next Hercules, and quietly takes its place in some subordinate position on the shelf of the apothecary. There, Veratrum Viridi succeeds Digitalis; here, Bourbon Whisky walks triumphantly in the footsteps of its illustrious predecessor, Cod Liver Oil; and Podofiline, even now, threatens to push King Calomel from the throne, no son of Mercury perhaps succeeding. It requires about as much nerve and resolution for a physician, especially in village or country practice, to ignore the prevailing medical fashion, as for a lady to disregard the fashion in the arrange- ment of her dress or the style of her bonnet. If the reigning medical fashion be to stimulate freely, and Dr. A should suffer a patient to die without the help of brandy, his chance is small for another patient in that neighborhood, espe- cially if he happen to have, as a competitor for practice, an unscru- pulous medical brother, who will give the gossips of the neighbor- hood a timely hint, that the man died in consequence of a failure of the vital powers [an undoubted fact], while brandy is reputed callable of reinforcing them. Even a fair and temperate statement of the extent to which alcoholic liquors are now prescribed by a majority of the medical men of the country, would sevei'ely tax the credulity of the public who may have taken no special pains to leai'n the facts in the case. As a prophylactic, they are extensively employed, while there is not a particle of reliable evidence that they ever contribute in the smallest degree to prevent the injurious action of an impure atmos- phere, bad water, or sudden and great changes of temperature. Scores of distinguished medical men who have practiced for many years in tropical climates, have in their published works borne testi- mony to the truth I have just stated. Bad as alcoholic stimulation is in cold climates, it is infinitely worse in tropical ones. Again, alcoholic liquors are extensively prescribed as adjuncts to tonics, and a generous diet in almost all cases of general debility, and as needful support in long-continued and exhausting fevers. If, happily, the patient live, in spite of the fever and the alcoholic poisons administered during its continuance, and convalescence be faii'ly established, he is again subjected by many practitioners to the influence of stimulants with a view to hasten recovery; and just here an amount of mischief is done which can scarcely be estimated, foz, in thousands of instances all over the land, the patient thus