Dr. James Miller, of Edinburgh, says in Alcohol, Its Place and Power, written many years ago:—
"It may be well here to correct an important error, yet very current, in regard to the medicinal use of alcohol. People regard it as a simple and common tonic; and are ready to accept its supposed help as such in every form of weakness and general disorder of health. But it is ordinarily, no true tonic."
Dr. Ernest Hart, editor of the British Medical Journal, stated some years ago at a meeting of the British Medical Temperance Association that "the medical profession were nearly all agreed that alcohol is neither a food nor a tonic."
Many drunkards have been made, especially among women, by the delusion that alcohol has tonic effect. As a sample of these sad cases the following is given, taken from a recent number of The National Advocate:—
"There is in the jail at Elizabeth, N. J., a woman who was arrested while participating in wild drunken orgies with a gang of tramps in the woods near the town. She appears nothing but a besotted hag, but was only a short time ago a dutiful wife of a respectable man, and the mother of three beautiful children. Her father, who is said to be living in a village in New York State, is a highly respected minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Her children are in an asylum, and her husband is a wanderer in the West. The cause of her ruin was beer, prescribed for her by the family physician as a tonic. At first she refused to take it, having always been a teetotaler, but persuaded to obey the physician, she soon acquired a taste for the drink that speedily developed into the overmastering appetite, which has brought her and hers to this sad condition."
