Twentieth century practice v 3 1895 Author:Unknown Author 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: as tobacco, tea, coffee, and potassium bromide. The excessive use of such articles, as of various drugs which have been habitually and excessively indulged in (f... more »or on some constitutions any substance may make such an abiding impression as will stamp itself on the individual subject unless by a supreme effort it be grappled with), may cause considerable damage to the system; but, except in a sequela of mental unsoundness, material structure and bodily function are alone immediately affected, the morale and the conscience either remaining unimpaired, or being injuriously influenced only as a remote result of preceding physical pathological depravity. Excess in alcohol is daily credited, in police courts and before higher judicial tribunals, with offences against morality, law, and order; excess in coffee or tobacco never. Till about a century ago, when Benjamin Rush laid down that habitual drunkards were diseased persons, with the exception of occasional utterances by a few thoughtful and far-seeing medical philosophers from the time of Hippocrates downward, there was a general belief that drunkenness was a purely voluntary condition, that men and women could get drunk or refrain from getting drunk as they chose, and that intoxication was a pastime willingly and wilfully indulged in; nor is this erroneous belief wholly dead. The many who formerly held and the comparatively few who still cherish this opinion, looking upon the whole matter of drunkenness as a mere immorality, vice, or crime, see no need for any medical consideration of the subject; punishment in a jail, confinement in the "stocks," pulpit denunciation, ecclesiastical excommunication, or the administration of a good whipping, being in their view the proper mode of dealing with such wanton and depraved outcasts. But ...« less