HEREDITY IN ALCOHOLISM.

Globe, Volume IX, Issue 1285, 2 May 1878, Page 3

HEREDITY IN ALCOHOLISM.

The London Press points out that in the London Medical Record for January, Dr. Charles Aldridge gives an interesting account of Taquet’s observations on this subject. M. Taquet would place the abuse of spirits in the first lino of causes which tend to depopulation. A.s Lancreaux has said, alcoholism is not only a disease of the individual, but is a family disease, and projects its evil influence upon the race. One sees it follow the individual in his offspring, his family receiving from him a fatal heritage in debility, deafness, a crowd of nervous disorders, moral imbecility, idiocy, mental alienation, and weaker instincts. The Indians of America have disappeared before the destructive powers of alcohol, when fire and sword failed to vanquish them, Daredin tells us that the families of drunkards become extinct in the fourth generation, after having descended through the scale of physical and intellectual degeneration. A remarkable case, cited by Taquet, in which most of the children of a drunkard showed serious manifestations of hereditary alcoholism, presented two important considerations : —“ 1. That sexual desires show themselves early in children of drunkards, and are associat ed with an absence of moral sense. 2. That phthisis, when not hereditary, is capable of being produced by spirituous excesses, Magnus, Huss, and Launay have supported this thesis by numerous examples. Again, other things being equal, the hereditary transmission will be more surely by the mother than the father. The children of female drunkards are often idiots, imbeciles, insane, or epileptic. Of all the manifestations of alcoholic heredity, epilepsy is believed to be the most common. Of ninety-five epileptics examined by M. A. Voison, twelve had ancestors who died from alcoholic excess. Marceut reports of a drunkard who had sixteen children, that five were dead aud the remainder epileptic.