Addresses of Rev. Henry W. Bellows, D.D., and Professor Roswell D. Hitchcock : delivered at the Broadway Tabernacle, Nov. 7, 1855, in behalf of the United States Inebriate Asylum : Dr. Turner's address to the Board of Directors.

  • Bellows, Henry W. (Henry Whitney), 1814-1882.
Date:
1855
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Addresses of Rev. Henry W. Bellows, D.D., and Professor Roswell D. Hitchcock : delivered at the Broadway Tabernacle, Nov. 7, 1855, in behalf of the United States Inebriate Asylum : Dr. Turner's address to the Board of Directors. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

    9/48 (page 9)
    horrible fate before which the heroes and heroines of the old classic tragedy succumbed, or that iron house of the Inquisition, moving its horrid walls day by day an inch nearer to its caged victim, and in the end crushing him with remorseless but protracted cruelty, are not too dreadful images of the power of drunkenness. How pitiful are the misfortunes—certainly as great as the crimes—of him on whom this leprosy has fastened! and for those with whom he is connected—his wife, his children, his parents. Is the old Myzentian cruelty, which bound the loathsome corpse face to face with the living, more frightful than the fate of the drunkard's kindred and friends? But now, how has Society treated the drunkard ? She has either let him alone, or immured him in prisons and jails. She has been compelled to do the last for her own preservation; for drunkenness is the matrix of crime and injury, the devourer of the public wealth and safety, the serpent that tempts murder, and arson, and lust, and theft, and every other crime and vice, to its daily iniquity. But do we not do a serious violence to the moral sense of the community by this confounding of weakness with malignity, of vice with crime? Every- body knows and feels that a drunkard, though quite as dangerous as a murderer, and perhaps the cause of as much loss of life, is not de- serving of a murderer's fate ; that vice ought not to be treated as crime. Every time a man suffers for crimes committed in drunken- ness, the conscience and humanity of the public are shocked, as much as though insanity were treated as crime, as it so long was. The enlightened conscience of the world demanded the separation of insan- ity and crime; it now demands the separation of drunkenness and crime. They must both be restrained, but in distinct ways and for separate ends. Drunkenness needs to be restrained a thousand times as much as it is ; but it never can be, so long as the criminal police are its controllers, and the jail its house of correction. So long it will lie corroding in the homes of the land, eating out the vitals of families; wives, sisters, children, wearing out tbeir hearts in concealing, pro- tecting, and restraining it. Alas ! the sum of misery which the un- provided means of society for the confinement and correction of drunk- enness occasions, is past all telling. There is hardly a man or woman present that does not know this from an experience they would shudder to relate. I have seen the day when I would have given the results of