ALCOHOL AND LUNACY.

Grey River Argus, Volume XVI, Issue 2274, 22 November 1875, Page 2

ALCOHOL AND LUNACY.

In a very able article on " Hereditary Physical Transmission," by Dr Carpenter, printed in the Contemporary Review for January, the following passage, referring to the tendency which the inordinate U3e of alcoholic liquors has to promote the hereditary transmission of idiotcy, occurs: — " There is one class of cases, moreover, in which a particular abnormal form of nutrition that is distinctly acquired by the individual, exerts a most injurious influence upon the offspring — that, namely, which is the result of habitual alcoholic excess. There can be no reasonable question that the continual action of what have been termed nervine stimulants modifies the nutrition of the nervous system ; for in no other way can we account for the fact— unfortunately but too familiar— that it not only comes to tolerate what would have been in the first instance absolutely poisonous, but that it comes to be dependent upon a repetition of the dose for the power of sustaining its ordinary activity, and that the want of such repetition produces an almost unbearable craving, which is purely physical, as that of hunger or thirst. Now all these ' nervine stimulants ' further agree in this, that while they excite or misdirect the automatic activity of ihe mind, they weaken the controlling power of the will ; and this is exactly the condition which, intensified and fixed into permanence, constitutes insanity. We have a far larger experience of the results' of habitual alcoholic excess, than we have in regard to any other 'nervine stimulant ;' and all such experience is decidedly in favor of hereditary transmission* of that acquired perversion of the normal nutrition of the nervous system which it has induced. That this manifests itself sometimes in congenital idiotcy, sometimes in a predisposition to insanity which requires but a very Blight exciting cause to develop it, and sometimes in a strong craving for alcoholic drinks, which the unhappy subject of it strives in vain to resist, is the concurrent testimony of all who have directed their attention to the inquiry. That Dr Howe, in his report on the statistics of idiotcy in Massachusetts, states that tHe habits of the parents of 300 idiots having been learned, 145, or nearly one-half, were found to be habitual drunkards. In one instance, in which both parents were drunkards, seven idiotic children were born to them. Dr Down, whose experience of idiotcy is greater than that of any other man in this country, has assured me that he does not consider Dr Howe's statement as at all exaggerated. Sir W. A. F. Browne, the first Medical Lunacy Commißsioner for Scotland, thus wrote when himself in charge of a large asylum : — 'The drunkard not only injures and enfeebles his own nervous sytem, but entails mental disease upon his family. His daughters are nervous and hysterical ; his sons are weak, wayward, and eccentric, and sink under the pressure of excitement, of some unforseen exigency, or the ordinary calls of duty. Dr Howe remarks that the children of drunkards are deficient in bodily and vital energy, and are predisposed by their very organisation to have cravings for alcoholic stimulants."