Mental Influence.—Other so-called cures and treatments have followed almost exactly similar lines. The main element in the cure has been the producing in the mind of the patient a definite idea that he can stay away from liquor if he really wishes to and then helping his run-down physical condition so that he craves stimulants less than before. Whenever such "sure cures" are used on the worst forms of alcoholic patients as we see them in the large general hospitals of our greater cities, the bums of the streets, the drunkards of a score of years or more, they have practically no effect. The man must have moral stamina, he must have some character left, besides, as a rule, he must have some good reasons in worldly interest to help him to brace up and then he may get away from alcoholism if he sincerely wills to reform. The important element, however, is the will to do so. If he is firmly convinced that he cannot stay away from liquor, if he feels in spite of all that has been done for him that he cannot resist his craving, then, of course, he will not reform. Men, however, who have sunk to the lowest depths, who, according to their own and others' testimony, have scarcely drawn a [{697}] sober breath for ten or even twenty years, sometimes have something happen to them, often it seems very trivial to everyone but themselves, that stiffens their relaxed moral fiber, that wakens their sense of manhood, that serves quite beyond expectation to give them a new purpose in life, and they reform and never drink again.
It is this successful phase of the cure of alcoholism, however it may be explained, that is most interesting. It represents the most encouraging aspect of the whole question. Probably nothing more harmful has ever been done than the public proclamation that alcoholism is often an hereditary disease against which it is hopeless to struggle, and that the poor victims of it are to be pitied and not blamed. Except in those of low mentality, whether of intellect or will, or in the actually insane, there never was a case of alcoholism that did not deserve at least as much blame as is usually accorded to it. This is said after making due allowances for temperament. It is quite clear that for one man alcohol has no attractions at all, while for another the craving for it is almost an insuperable temptation. It is idle to say that these two contrasted men are equally free as to whether they shall take alcohol or not. Of course they are not equally free. If the man who has no craving for alcohol prides himself on his power of resistance against the vile habit, he is simply fooling himself. He probably knows nothing about the real nature of the temptation of alcohol. The Spaniards have a proverb: "He who doesn't drink wine and doesn't smoke, the devil gets by some other way." There is probably something else with regard to which the non-alcoholic has quite as little freedom as the poor victim of alcoholism and the great law of compensation comes in to make up to both of them, for their failings. Man has the defects of his virtues.
Supposed Inheritance.—No man is such a slave to the habit, however, that he cannot correct it if he will. We have heard much about the inheritance of this disease. We have heard even more about its essentially morbid character, though people used to think it a moral defect. It must still be considered a moral defect, however, even though we all concede that there is an element of the pathological in it. We are getting away entirely from the ordinary idea of inheritance of disease. There is no inheritance of acquired characters. The fact that a man's father acquired the drinking habit because he was placed in circumstances where it was easy for him to indulge himself and because he did not have the moral stamina to resist, is no reason why his son should have an unconquerable or even a very strong craving for alcohol. One might as well say that because a father lost a finger when he was young his son would be born without that finger. Alcohol destroyed certain cells in the father's body and injured certain others, but produced no change deep enough to lead to hereditary influences.
Contagion More than Heredity.—Perhaps some tendency to take alcohol runs in a family, that is, perhaps there is lessened resistance to the craving for stimulants that awakens in every human being if it is once aroused. This is what is true in tuberculosis. Some people have less resistive vitality to it than others. Careful autopsies show that practically every man who lives to be over thirty has or has had living tubercle bacilli in his tissues. Seven-eighths of us are thoroughly able to resist them. The other eighth succumbs. Their lack of resistive vitality may in some degree be due to hereditary taint, [{698}] but that is doubtful and we know that they acquire the disease by contact with others who have it already and, as a rule, it is able to work its ravages because they are not living in conditions that would help them to resist it. If they live in the free open air and have plenty of good, simple food, the disease will not run its fatal course, but nature will cure it. If the craving for alcohol is lighted up by association, aroused by indulgence, rendered strong by environment and by exposure to temptations of all kinds with regard to it, then the resistive power of the individual is so lowered that the alcoholic habit rules him instead of his being able to command it.
Inherited Resistance.—The most curious fact that has come out in our studies of heredity in recent years has been that far from heredity working its will in causing degeneration and deterioration of mankind, immunity, for the race at least, is acquired in the course of subjection to disease and to various morbid habits. Nations, for instance, that have been subjected to diseases for long periods no longer display the susceptibility to them which they formerly possessed. After a disease has been endemic among a people for many generations that people gradually becomes quite insusceptible to its effects and suffers much less from it than before.
Just this same thing is true of alcoholism. Nations that have been the longest in a position to be subject to the temptation to use alcohol in its stronger forms suffer least from the ravages of alcoholism. The southern nations of Europe using wine daily and knowing well the process of distillation to help them to make stronger drink for many hundreds of years, now exhibit much less tendency to over-indulgence in strong drink than the northern nations whose ancestors have only in comparatively recent times been subjected to the temptation of craving for strong alcoholic liquors. The attitude of any nation toward alcohol is a function of the length of time that nation has had a chance to procure strong drink easily. Our American Indians discovered, as has every people at some time, that intoxicating liquor could be made by allowing solutions of starch and sugar to ferment. It was only with the coming of the European, however, that they were provided with "fire water"—strong drink—in quantities. Its effect on them is a matter of history. Two things the white man brought his Indian brother to which the Indians were unaccustomed and that gradually obliterated the original inhabitants of this country—infectious diseases and strong alcoholic liquors. They proved equally fatal because of Indian susceptibility to them.
From these considerations it is clear that just such an immunity to the effect of alcohol is produced in a people exposed to its effects in concentrated form for a long time as with regard to an infectious disease when they have been correspondingly exposed to it. Heredity, then, instead of playing a role that brings about deterioration in the race, on the contrary, carries on the higher qualities and gives us, as might be expected in the course of evolution, a better, that is, a more resistant, race. Most of what is commonly said as to alcoholism, and unfortunately most of the recent so-called popular scientific articles on this subject, seem to point to just the opposite conclusion to this. Men are supposed to be condemned by heredity to an inevitable craving to take alcoholic drinks that, in certain of them at least, cannot be overcome by any natural power of resistance. At this stage of our western civilization this is not true for anyone, as the more susceptible families have been long [{699}] since eliminated and it is a personal weakness and not a family characteristic that leads people to indulge this appetite to their own destruction.
Unfavorable Suggestion of Heredity Idea.—An alcoholic patient, or even a man with only a moderately strong tendency to take alcohol to excess, who harbors any such notion as this, has a serious impediment to the full exercise of his will in overcoming the difficulties that he encounters in any attempt at reform. In going counter to so much that has been written and still more that has been said and generally accepted on this subject I feel it necessary to quote a good recent authority on the matter and so here insert these passages from "The Principles of Heredity" by Dr. Archdall Reid. [Footnote 53] He says (p. 157):
[Footnote 53: Author of "The Present Evolution of Man," "Alcoholism," "A Study in Heredity," etc. Chapman and Hall, London, 1905.]
Formerly all the world believed in the transmission of acquirements, and consequently all the world was constantly finding conclusive evidence of its constant occurrence. To-day there is hardly a rag of that evidence left, and, with rare exceptions, only certain French medical observers are able to discover fresh evidence. It is a remarkable fact, however, that the problem of evolution—of adaptation—has excited singularly little interest in France, and it is equally curious that these French observations relate almost entirely to laboratory work which it is not easy to repeat. In Great Britain or Germany, you may cut off the tails of a thousand dogs, or amputate the limbs of a thousand men, or observe the non-infected offspring of a thousand tuberculous patients, and get no evidence of transmission.