nt. of all mental diseases stand in a direct or
indirect relation to the evil consequences of intemperance in the use of
intoxicating liquors. This is the opinion of a large number of
authorities on mental diseases in all countries. Habitual intemperance
leads to severe (psychical?) lesions (of the nervous system) which may
show themselves in the different forms of insanity, but express
themselves chiefly as mental weakness, not only in persons whose nervous
system was weakened through inherited or acquired defects, but also in
those whose mental organization was intact. In many other cases we see
less complete forms of insanity and more indistinct psychological
disturbances and neuroses, and among the latter epilepsy demands
particular attention.

An investigation among the patients in the insane department of the
Berlin Charite Hospital, in charge of Prof. Westfahl, which was lately
carried on by Dr. T. Galle (Uber die Beziehunger des Alcoholismus zur
Epilepsie. Inaug. Dissert. 1881, Berlin), showed that among 607 patients
who had entered the ward as epileptics or epileptic insane, 150 = 24.7
per cent. had been addicted to drink; 133 before, and 17 after the
disease had shown itself; further, that of 1572 patients with delirium
tremens, alcoholism, alcoholic dementia, and ebrietas, 243, or 15.4 per
cent., were epileptic; and that in 221 intemperance was present before
the outbreak of epilepsy; finally, that among 2679 patients which
entered the department in six and a half years, 393, or 18 per cent.,
were inebriates and epileptics. Among 128 epileptics which I had
occasion to note in the receiving institute, Plotseurie, 21 per cent.
were drunkards and 20 per cent. were the offspring of intemperate
parents.

If the list of injuries which intemperance, as we have seen, does
directly to the mental life of man is a very considerable one, the
baneful effect which is produced indirectly, by the intemperance of
parents, upon the mental constitution of their progeny is surely just as
great and disastrous. The children of intemperate parents frequently
become drunkards themselves; they have inherited a degeneration of the
vitiated constitution, and carry the stamp of this degeneration within
themselves. The offspring of drunkards are not only weakly and sickly,
and die early, especially of diseases of the brain, but, as Dahl, Morel,
Howe, Beach, and others have shown, they are frequently born idiotic, or
show early signs of