Treatment of Confirmed Drunkards.

Cromwell Argus, Volume II, Issue 101, 17 October 1871, Page 6

Treatment of Confirmed Drunkards.

Speaking on the subject of asylums for confirmed inebriates, a writer in the Melbourne Telegraph states that his experience had embraced all the phenomena of drunkenness and its cure, and it showed as clearly as possible that drunkenness, such as that which the inebriate asylum will have to deal with, is a bodily disease, and that it is only to bo cured by a treatment like that which is applied to any yther malady of the body. The craving is brought on by a depressed condition of the vital system, which, in its turn may be brought on by close confinement, bad air, acquired or inherited taint, or other things, and is no more due to a vicious impulse from the Satanic side of a man's nature than the stomach-ache or the ague, JS T o number of moral lessons addressed to the intellect of the victim, and no number of moral denunciations and threats aimed at his religious fedi'igs, will cure him, any more than they will give him a new mucou3 membrane or renew his ganglionic system for him ; and flue and imprisonment will not eradicate the disease from his organism, simply because itis a disease, and he drinks from organic necessity. " The victims come into the world," says Maudesly, "sufferingfrom the effects of an organisation which they did not create, and weighted with a destiny which they have neither the power nor the will to contend against," and the only way to release them from the tyranny under which they groan is to keep them beyond the reach of temptation and treat them as patients rather than criminals."