te the poisons
generated with sufficient rapidity to prevent their producing
fatal mischief in the body."

CHAPTER VI.

ALCOHOL AS A MEDICINE.

Although nearly all of the foremost scientific investigators of the
effects of alcohol upon the body have lost faith in the old views of the
usefulness of alcoholic liquors as remedial agencies a considerable
proportion of the medical profession do not seem yet to have learned how
to treat disease without recourse to the alcohol therapy. This is
largely due to the fact that the new thought has not yet crystallized to
any large extent in the medical text-books, and also to the widely
variant views held by professors of medicine.

The medical use of alcohol has been, and still is, the great bulwark of
the liquor traffic. The user of alcoholics as beverages always excuses
himself, if hard pressed by abstainers, upon the ground that they must
be of service or doctors would not recommend them so frequently. In all
prohibitory amendment, and no-license campaigns, the cry of "Useful as
Medicine" has been the hardest for temperance workers to meet, for they
have felt that they had to admit the statement as true, knowing nothing
to the contrary. Indeed, thousands of those who advocate the prohibition
of the sale of liquor as a beverage, use alcohol in some form quite
freely as medicine, and are as determined and earnest in defence of
their favorite "tipple" as any old toper could well be. Many use it in
the guise of cordials, tonics, bitters, restoratives and the thousand
and one nostrums guaranteed to cure all ills to which human flesh is
heir.

The wide-spread belief in the necessity and efficacy of alcoholics as
remedies is the greatest hindrance to the success of the temperance
cause. It is impossible to convince the mass of the people that what is
life-giving as medicine can be death-dealing as beverage. The two stand,
or fall, together. Hence there is no more important question before the
medical profession, and the people generally, than that of the action of
alcohol in disease, and, as a goodly number of the most distinguished
and successful physicians of Europe and America declare it to be harmful
rather than helpful, it behooves thoughtful people to carefully study
the reasons they assign for holding such an opinion. Certainly it is
true that if physicians and people would all adopt the views of the
advocates of non-alcoholic medication the temperance prob