Page:Alcohol, a Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine.djvu/52

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
44
ALCOHOL AS A MEDICINE.
 

ment of the temperance reform. There are, we believe, thousands of temperance adherents, who do not yet fully apprehend the importance of this hospital to the permanent extension and progress of temperance principles. Although prohibition as a principle has been accepted by many, yet in its practical application in the home in serious illness, it is still feared by the immense majority of even our strongest prohibitionists. We are organized upon the basis no alcohol in medicine, and we are preparing to demonstrate fully and scientifically, so he who runs may read, that as in health, so in disease and accident, alcohol in any form works to the hindrance and injury of the vital forces, and prevents the establishment and advancement of health processes in the system."

At the opening of the hospital, May 4, 1886, Miss Frances E. Willard, the president of the National W. C. T. U., gave the following address:—

"Nothing is changeless except change. The conservatives of one epoch are the madmen of the next, even as the radicals of to-day would have been the lunatics of yesterday. To prove this, just imagine the founders of this hospital declaring to my great-grandfather that because he had taken a cold was no reason why he should take a toddy; and per contra, imagine my great-grandfather's doctor marching into our presence here and now, with saddle-bags on arm, and after treating us each to a glass of grog for our stomach's sake, giving us a scientific disquisition on the sovereign virtues of the blue pill, and informing us that bleeding, cupping and starvation were the surest methods of cure! "That the story of Evolution is true I am by no means certain, but that 'We, Us, and Company,' are 'evoluting' with electric speed ourselves it is useless to deny. This very hospital is the latest mile-stone on the highway of progress in the American temperance reform. The conditions that have made its