Page:Alcohol, a Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine.djvu/378

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370
ALCOHOL AS A MEDICINE.

we can do without alcohol. It does harm rather than good. Alcohol masks the symptoms of disease, so that we cannot know the patient's real condition."—J. H. Museer, M. D., Philadelphia, Pa., Ex-President American Medical Association.

"It is time alcohol was banished from the medical armamentarium; whisky has killed thousands where it cured one."—J. H. McCormack, M. D., Secretary Kentucky Board of Health, and Organizer for the American Medical Association.

"I very rarely use alcohol in my practice. I think that its use is never essential. Physicians are using it less and less in the treatment of disease owing to the recognition that it is a narcotic, not a stimulant, and that other narcotics are usually better when a narcotic is required."—Richard C. Cabot, M. D., Professor of Clinical Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Mass.

"My position has been that alcohol should be prescribed with as much care as to indications and circumspection as to dose and method as in the use of any other drug that in health would prove harmful, as morphine, belladonna, aconite, quinine, etc. I believe strongly that in pneumonia, typhoid fever, and tuberculosis especially, the indiscriminate use of alcohol in the past has caused an incalculable amount of distress and needless disaster to suffering humanity."—Howard S. Anders, M. D., Professor of Physical Diagnosis, Medico-Chirurgical College, Philadelphia, Pa.

"I do not think alcohol of any value in the treatment of disease; formerly it was used a great deal in the hospital wards, and 'liquor slips' were daily signed. Now, I never order liquor in any quantity, and at times for weeks I have not signed a single slip ordering liquor."—Henry Jackson, M. D., Professor in Harvard Medical School.

"In the overwhelming majority of cases I am in entire sympathy with the movement to abolish the routine use of alcoholics from medicine, and I rarely advise such in my practice."—Edward R. Baldwin, M. D., Saranac Lake Sanitarium, New York.