The Pathology of Drunkenness Author:Charles Wilson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. CASUAL INTOXICATION. The moderate use of intoxicating drinks having passed into a confirmed habit, and familiarity with their effects having p... more »alled the first feelings of enjoyment which we have admitted them to have excited, less reserve will probably now be employed, both with reference to the quantities and the times in which they may be taken. Consumed, henceforth, occasionally to excess, a new order of phenomena begins to be produced; such as are still more discreditable to man as a being endowed with reason, and still more pernicious in their influence upon his organization and health. During occasions of festivity, the mental exhilaration, to which we have formerly alluded, must leave sometimes to the drinker too slight a command over his calmer reason, to enable him to pause after he has plunged himself into the whirl of excitement; so that, heaping continuously stimulant upon stimulant, he urges on the disturbance of his ideas, till it rises to the extent of real delirium. With his progressive intoxication, an extreme loquacity hurries the individual along into every form of indiscretion, tears the veil off his character, and betrays him either into intemperate attacks upon others, or into imprudent avowals with reference to his own thoughts and actions. His imagination revels in unas- sociated and distorted images; his memory fails; his ideas elude him; and, while still speaking, he forgets the subject of his discourse, and maunders without judgment and without coherence. His virtues decline into defects: his courage becomes bravado, his liberality profusion, his friendship fawning. Meanwhile, his physical agitation is in proportion with the disorder of his intellect. The face is flushed, the eyes flash, the brain throbs, and the action of the hea...« less