The Chief Enemy of Women : Part 7

Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles
by C. W. Saleeby, M.D.

(Page 27 of 30)

The truth is that the medical profession has long erred in this respect. Judgment has gone by superficials. Undoubtedly there is a greater bulk of milk when stout and porter are taken. But everyone knows that ordinary household milk may come from the cow or from the pump. The question is not how much bulk is there, but what does the bulk consist of? Definite chemical evidence, which may be repeated a thousand times, and which is allowed to go unchallenged by the vast host of doctors who are prescribing alcohol for nursing mothers all over the world, shows us that its influence is to increase the bulk of the milk while reducing the amount of its nutritive constituents, and adding to them one which is poisonous. The increase of bulk is easy to explain. Alcohol is exceedingly avid of water. Therefore the common experience that alcoholic liquors tend to increase the desire for liquid can readily be explained. Alcohol, leaving the blood, tends to withdraw with itself, if it can, a quantity of water. These two, in the milk, between them maintain the added bulk on account of which alcoholic liquors are so widely ordered for and drunk by nursing mothers throughout the civilized world. The infant mortality i. Therefore contributed to, and many women are urged and deceived by their love for their children into a practice which achieves their own ruin.

Doctors look back a hundred years or so and observe the amazing practices of their predecessors. They have record of prescriptions and treatments which were ridiculous or disgusting or trivial or painful; they have abundant record of practices which were deadly, and for which any medical man at the present day might be called upon to pay heavy damages or indicted for manslaughter. Yet in the matter of the indiscriminate and ignorant employment of alcohol, in defiance of overwhelmingly proved facts which will not be challenged by any of those whom this criticism hits and who will virulently resent it and decry its author, doctors of the present day are assuredly earning the astonished contempt of their successors in times by no means remote. A certain number of women who nurse or will nurse will read this book.

Of these not a few will be ordered various alcoholic beverages by their medical attendant in order to aid this function. Let them obey his orders when he has satisfactorily answered the following questions: Are you aware that part of the alcohol will pass unchanged through my breast into my baby's body? Are you aware that if my milk is analyzed it will be found to contain less food for the baby with more bulk than if I were to do without the alcohol? Are you aware that careful inquiry and observation have shown that the best foods for the making of milk are those which contain the constituents of milk - as seems not unreasonable - like milk itself and bread and butter and meat? Can you begin to explain any imaginable process by which either the animal or the vegetable body could build up a molecule composed as the molecule of alcohol is into any of the nutritive ingredients in milk? That catechism is quite short, but it will suffice.

A serious error which has long been made by temperance workers consists in supposing that the problem of alcoholism is the problem of drunkenness. They speak of "the sin of intemperance," and by that term they mean only such intemperance as produces what should properly be called acute alcoholic intoxication. The friends of alcohol eagerly accept an error which suits their case so admirably. Nothing can suit them better than to assume that alcohol does no ill apart from causing drunkenness. Better still, they are able to quote the case of the incurable drunkard, suffering from an uncontrollable craving, and to point out quite truly that he will get drunk in any case no matter how many public-houses, for instance, we close.

It was always a gross error to suppose that drunkenness was the whole of the evil done by alcohol; if, indeed, it be one percent. of it, which we may doubt. This is not a point which one need trouble to argue here, except in so far as our right understanding of it is necessary if we are to see the meaning of current changes in the drinking habits of the people. That women are drinking more, everyone grants. That this is evil not merely for the women of the present but for both genders in the future, I am constantly asserting. But it will not do at all to use mere drunkenness as our measure of what is happening amongst women. We know that in either gender a single bout of drinking, say once a week on Saturday night, may leave the individual little worse, may injure health quite inappreciably, if at all; it may not interfere with his work, and may even be of small economic importance.

In such a coal-mining county as Durham, for instance, where alcohol cannot be drunk in association with work because the workman and his fellows know that the safety of their lives will not permit it, we find a huge proportion of arrests for drunkenness, and it might be supposed that in this most drunken county in England we should find the highest proportion of permanent consequences of alcoholism. On the contrary, as Dr. Sullivan says, "owing to their relative freedom from industrial drinking coal-miners show a remarkably low rate of alcoholic mortality, ranking in fact with the agriculturists and below all the other industrial groups." Here is a simple statistical fact which continues true year by year, and the significance of which must be insisted upon.

In the case of women, the very obvious and natural tendency is for the proportion of drunkenness to the alcohol consumed to be much lower than in the case of men. Drunkenness is commonly the result of convivial drinking. A company of men get together, and they help each other to get drunk. Women are not subjected to so many temptations in this respect. Their drinking is industrial drinking, - above all, at the supreme industry, which is the culture of the racial life. Like other industrial drinking, it is less conspicuous than convivial drinking; it leads to few arrests for drunkenness, but it has far graver effects on the individual, and it shows its consequences in the industrial product with which in this case no other industrial product can compare. Now unless we disabuse ourselves once and for all of the notion that the drink question is merely the drunkenness question, we should never succeed in rightly approaching and dealing with this most ominous development of modern civilization, to which I have done such imperfect justice in the present chapter.

Dr. Sullivan has some important remarks on this subject from which one cannot do better than freely quote. As a distinguished and experienced Medical Officer in H. M. Prison Service, notably at Holloway, where so many women have been under his care, Dr. Sullivan has very special credentials, even if the internal evidence of his book did not convince us. He says that:

Press of J. J. Little & Ives Co., New York.
Copyright 1911 by Mitchell Kennerley.