Page:Alcohol, a Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine.djvu/385

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ALCOHOL AS A MEDICINE.
377

"You are right in indicting alcohol for its insidious wrongs to humanity. It is an old and sly offender and very much the 'mocker' in medical practise that it has been pronounced in holy writ. It exhausts the latent energy of the organism often when that power is most needed to conserve the failing strength of the body in the battle with disease."—Dr. C. H. Hughes, St. Louis, Missouri.

"The best class of thinkers, men of the best intellectual gauge, are those who are doing away with this miserable, unscientific practise of giving liquor."—Dr. Boynton, Clifton Springs, N. Y.

"I believe that in the scientific light of the present era alcohol should be classed among the anaesthetics and poisons, and that the human family would be benefited by its entire exclusion from the field of remedial agents."—Dr. J. S. Cain, Dean of the Faculty, Medical Department, University of the South, Sewanee, Tenn.

"Let me cite my experience in surgery for the last three years in proof of the uselessness of alcohol, and the benefit of abstinence from its administration. During that time I have performed more than one thousand operations, a large portion upon cases of railroad injuries, one hundred for appendicitis, and in none of these was alcohol administered in any form, either before, during, or after operations. I defy any one who still adheres to alcohol to show as good results. Equally gratifying results have been obtained with my medical cases, and I fail to understand how any observing and thinking physician can still cling to so prejudicial a drug as alcohol, when he has within his reach a multitude of valuable, exact, and reliable methods for combating, governing, and controlling disease."—Dr. Evan C. Kane, Surgeon Pennsylvania Railroad, Kane, Pa.

"In my neurological practice I emphatically forbid my patients the use of alcohol. This poison has a special predilection for the nervous system which it influences sometimes to an alarming extent."—Alfred Gordon, M. D., Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, Pa.