What Is Alcohol's Value as a Medicine?

The Curse and the Cure of Strong Drink
by T. S. Arthur

(Page 9 of 22)

Our reply to this question will be brief. The reader has, already, the declaration of the International Medical Congress, that, as a medicine, the range of alcohol is limited and doubtful, and that its self-prescription by the laity should be utterly discountenanced by the profession. No physician who has made himself thoroughly acquainted with the effects of alcohol when introduced into the blood and brought in contact with the membranes, nerves and organs of the human body, would now venture to prescribe its free use to consumptives as was done a very few years ago.

"In the whole management of lung diseases," remarks Dr. Hunt, "with the exception of the few who can always be relied upon to befriend alcohol, other remedies have largely superseded all spirituous liquors. Its employment in stomach disease, once so popular, gets no encouragement, from a careful examination of its local and constitutional effects, as separated from the water, sugar and acids imbibed with it."

Typhoid Fever

It is in typhoid fever that alcohol has been used, perhaps, most frequently by the profession; but this use is now restricted, and the administration made with great caution. Prof. A.L. Loomis, of New York City, has published several lectures on the pathology and treatment of typhoid fever. Referring thereto, Dr. Hunt says: "No one in our country can spoke more authoritatively, and as he has no radical views as to the exclusion of alcohol, it is worth while to notice the place to which he assigns it. In the milder cases he entirely excludes it. As a means of reducing temperature, he does not mention it, but relies on cold, quinine, and sometimes, digitalis and quinine."

When, about the third week, signs of failure of heart-power begin to manifest themselves, and the use of some form of stimulant seems to be indicated, Dr. Loomis gives the most guarded advice as to their employment. "Never," he says, "give a patient stimulants simply because he has typhoid fever." And again, "Where there is reasonable doubt as to the propriety of giving or withholding stimulants, it is safer to withhold them." He then insists that, if stimulants are administered, the patient should be visited every two hours to watch their effects.

It will therefore be seen how guarded has now become the use of alcohol as a cardiac stimulant in typhoid fevers, where it was once employed with an almost reckless freedom. Many practitioners have come to exclude it altogether, and to rely wholly on ammonia, ether and foods.

In Cameron's "Hygiene" is this sentence: "In candor, it must be admitted that many eminent physicians deny the efficacy of alcohol in the treatment of any kind of disease, and some assert that it is worse than useless."

Accumulative Testimony

Dr. Arnold Lees, F.L.S., in a recent paper on the "Use and Action of Alcohol in Disease," assumes "that the old use of alcohol was not science, but a grave blunder." Prof. C.a. Parks says: "It is impossible not to feel that, so far, the progress of physiological inquiry renders the use of alcohol (in medicine) more and more doubtful." Dr. Anstie says: "If alcohol is to be administered at all for the relief of neuralgia, it should be given with as much precision, as to dose, as we should use in giving an acknowledged deadly poison." Dr. F.T. Roberts, an eminent English physician, in advocating a guarded use of alcohol in typhoid fever, says: "Alcoholic stimulants are, by no means, always required, and their indiscriminate use may do a great deal of harm." In Asiatic cholera, brandy was formerly administered freely to patients when in the stage of collapse.

The effect was injurious, instead of beneficial. "Again and again," says Prof. G. Johnson, "have I seen a patient grow colder, and his pulse diminish in volume and power, after a dose of brandy, and, apparently, as a direct result of the brandy." And Dr. Pidduck, of London, who used common salt in cholera treatment, says: "Of eighty-six cases in the stage of collapse, sixteen only proved fatal, and scarcely one would have died, if I had been able to prevent them from taking brandy and laudanum." Dr. Collenette, of Guernsey, says: "For more than thirty years I have abandoned the use of all kinds of alcoholic drinks in my practice, and with such good results, that, were I sick, nothing would induce me to have resource to them - they are but noxious depressants."

As a non-professional writer, we cannot go beyond the medical testimony which has been educed, and we now leave it with the reader. We could add many pages to this testimony, but such cumulative evidence would add but little to its force with the reader. If he is not yet convinced that alcohol has no food value, and that, as a medicine, its range is exceedingly limited, and always of doubtful administration, nothing further that we might be able to cite or say could have any influence with him.

About the Author

Timothy Shay Arthur (1809 - 1885) was a popular nineteenth-century American author. He is most famous for his temperance novel Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There, which helped demonize alcohol in the eyes of the American public. Virtually forgotten now, Arthur did much to articulate and disseminate the values, beliefs, and habits that defined respectable, decorous middle-class life in antebellum America.