WEAKENING THE MORAL FIBER
With the inaccuracy of sense perception and loss of memory and diminished judgment, one cannot be surprised to find that alcoholics are notoriously inaccurate, unreliable and untruthful. They cannot tell the truth even with assistance. But often what is credited to them as untruthfulness is mere inability to perceive things accurately, to remember accurately, and therefore to state things accurately. With the deterioration of the personality, that is, of the will, one would naturally expect that the deterioration of morals would go hand in hand. One cannot remain moral or virtuous without sufficient will to do so, and without sufficient will to make a struggle for self-control, and this is so in the case of a mind poisoned by alcohol. I do not claim that lack of morals is a disease, but moral development has appeared late in the development of the race, and such racial development is expressed by the individual. With the deteriorated mentality of the alcoholic, we must expect that the characteristics of late development will be the first to go, and for this reason we must realize that alcoholism naturally tends to immorality and crime. As a matter of fact, it is claimed that fifty per cent. of the crimes in France and forty-one per cent. in Germany are due to alcoholism, and no doubt in England and America the percentage is equally high. As might be expected, the offenses are principally those of disregard of the rights of others, contempt of law and order, assault, disturbances of domestic peace and robbery, and to all these crimes the habitual drunkard is particularly prone.
But it is not my purpose to discuss the effect of alcohol in any way except as it pertains to the human body, nor to go into the reasons why men so poison their bodies as to bring about these deleterious results. The deterioration that we have been considering, when occurring in the mind, would naturally cause one to infer that insanity must also be common in those who are addicted to alcohol, and such is indeed the case. In New York State alone I believe it can be safely said that fully ten per cent. of the women and thirty per cent. of the men confined in the state asylums are there through forms of insanity caused by alcohol. It will not profit us to go into the various forms of alcoholic insanity, but when we realize that one-third of the men in the insane asylums to-day in New York are there because of excessive indulgence in alcohol, and also that the State spends annually over six million dollars to care for them, we realize both the terrible ravages that alcoholic poison has made on the mentality of men and the enormous cost that it entails upon the community.
As to the alcohol circulating in the blood, there is an endeavor naturally to get rid of it as with all poisons, and the kidneys in this endeavor show the same processes that are elsewhere seen, of destruction of the specific cells, congestion, and increased connective tissue growth. Whether it is that these cells are destroyed in an endeavor to eliminate various substances for which they are not fitted and break down under the strain, or whether they are directly poisoned by the alcohol itself, the resultant factors are those best understood in the lay mind as acute and chronic Bright’s disease. Whether or not alcohol produces these various processes in the kidneys which result in these diseased conditions, there is no question but that certain of these diseased conditions appear more frequently in alcoholics than in others. Besides the destructive processes about which we have been speaking in the various viscera, there are certain results of alcohol that may be said to affect the general condition of the individual. By this I mean the general resistance to bacterial infection, the resistance to injury to the body, and the ability to repair such injuries. Alcohol diminishes the power of the body to resist bacterial infection. The alcoholic is more prone to acquire bacterial diseases, and when these are acquired he is infinitely less able to resist them. In Bellevue Hospital in 1904 there were 1,001 patients with lobar pneumonia. Of these, 667 gave a history of alcoholism; 334 were non-alcoholics, which means that there were twice as many alcoholics suffering from this disease as non-alcoholics. Among the alcoholics the mortality was fifty per cent., and among the non-alcoholics, 23.9 per cent. Here again the mortality among the alcoholics was more than double that which prevailed among those who had not taken this narcotic. The same is true of other infectious diseases. When injuries occur to the body, such as broken legs or arms, there is a very wide difference in the picture produced in those who have drunk to excess, and those who have been sober. The shock produced in these instances is greater in the weakened nervous system of the alcoholic, and among those who have habitually taken alcohol there is a very great tendency after broken bones to develop delirium tremens, and when this occurs in these patients, the outlook is always very grave. A broken leg or arm does not bring with it any such danger to those who have led sober lives. The process of recovery from disease and accident, owing to the deteriorated nervous system and the poisoned circulatory system, is much slower in alcoholics than in others.
WEAK WILLS INHERITED
Unfortunately, the injury which alcohol does, and the processes of deterioration which it sets on foot, do not end with the individual. Alcohol poisons and injures the germ cells of both sexes, and the offspring of those addicted to its use may inherit a weakened and injured nervous system. The taste for alcohol, the craving, so called, is not inherited. This idea that, because a man has an alcoholic father or mother, he inherits the taste for alcohol, is a superstition that has been used by the weak as an excuse both for overindulgence in alcohol, and as a further excuse why no attempt should be made to check their indulgence. What is inherited is a weak, unstable intellect and personality, prone to excesses in all things, one that is weak-willed and weak in resistance to temptation, and one more easily affected by alcohol than the ordinary normal individual. There is also often inherited a lack of moral perception and moral sense, causing the individual to do things which make one doubt his sanity; yet he can not be called insane, but really wanders in the border line between mad and bad, which is often worse than insanity itself. Alcoholic inheritance does not stop at instability of the nervous system or weakness of the personality, and one is rather staggered to realize the high percentage of imbecile, epileptic and weak-minded children that may be born to alcoholic parents. A detailed study of the imbecile school-children throughout all Switzerland showed that fifty per cent. of them were born in the days nine months after the periods of greatest alcoholic indulgence, such as the New Year, the Carnival, and the grape harvest, and that the births of the other half of the imbeciles were evenly scattered through the remaining thirty-eight weeks of the year. It has been shown that in France, Germany, Poland and Switzerland, from twenty-eight to seventy per cent. of the epileptics in some of the institutions were the descendants of alcoholics. Demme, in comparing the results of the health and death rates between ten alcoholic families and ten non-alcoholic families, found that in the alcoholic families out of fifty-seven children, twenty-five were still-born or died in the first month of life; twenty-two were designated as sick, and ten as healthy—while in the non-alcoholic families, five were still-born or died early, six were sick, and fifty were healthy. Thus only 17.5 per cent. in the alcoholic families were healthy, while eighty-two per cent. in the non-alcoholic families were healthy, and only eighteen per cent. not healthy. The percentages, therefore, were almost exactly reversed. These statistics mean that not alone may the chronic alcoholic bequeath his poisoned nervous system to posterity, but from the statistics in Switzerland of the imbecile children, we must realize that even a temporary debauch may leave a curse upon the innocent child; they also mean that alcohol produces those processes in the individual which tend to the degeneration of the race, and tend after a few generations to extinction, and thus does Nature benefit the race by turning a curse into a blessing through the extinction of the degenerate.
Footnote:
[1] I have heard of a New Yorker who gave up his attendance as a member of the executive committee of a prominent and very useful reform association because, though an occasional smoker, he could not endure the tobacco-laden atmosphere of the room where the committee met.
To this day his associates probably think him a very lukewarm worker in the cause!