“The use of alcohol as a beverage or therapeutically, is in either case a habit of the user. The stimulation is but temporary, the reaction leaving the nerve cells of the individual with less resisting power than before the ingestion of alcohol. * * * Never permit a verbal or written prescription of yours to give rise to the use of a habit forming drug.”—From a lecture to students in Omaha Medical College by J. M. Aiken, M. D., Clinical Instructor and Lecturer upon Nervous and Mental Diseases.
“The use of spirits as a stimulant in diseases, except in a very limited circle, is a mere empiricism for which no good reasons can be given. The teachings of medical men are no more to be followed blindly and without question. The tests of alcohol as a tonic, as a food, as a stimulant, as a retarder of waste, are all negative. There is no reliable evidence to support these claims, but a constant accumulation of facts to indicate the danger from the use of spirits. To give alcohol or any other drug without some rational theory in accord with the scientific researches of to-day is unpardonable.”—Dr. T. D. Crothers, Hartford, Conn., Editor of the Journal of Inebriety.
“Many physicians prescribe alcohol only because it is the desire of the patient, and because patients refuse medicine which the physicians would rather use.”—Everett Hooper, M. D. Boston, Mass.
“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 anæsthetics 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.