NO-LICENSE CAMPAIGN.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXX, Issue 441, 10 November 1908, Page 4

NO-LICENSE CAMPAIGN.

PUBLISHED BY ARRANGEMENT.

MEDICAL TESTIMONY AGAINST INTOXICATING LIQUOR.

Prof. G. Sisns Woodhcad, M.D., Prof, of Pathology, Cambridge University ; Member of Royal Commission on Tuberculosis. Alcohol is very rapidly absorbed into the blood, so rapidly indeed that it comes into direct contact with the tissues of the body, and is thus enabled to commence its deadly work at once, and while it is being oxodized. This is one of the reasons assigned to the statement that alcohol is not a food. Further, it is not made up of those elements that are necessary for the building up of our tissues. Every man and every woman, no matter whether he or she be healthy or unhealthy, is better for abstinence from the use of alcohol as a beverage. Alcohol passes into the blood very rapidly and then readily passes from that of the mother to the blood of the unborn child. It is for this reason that the mortality amongst the children born of drunken mothers is so great, or, if such children do survive, that they are so informed, poorly developed, and so miserably perverted both morally and intellectually. Any adult who feels that alcohol is necessary for his health is already treading a very dangerous path, and it is high time that he pulled up. Sir Frederick Treves, The King’s Surgeon. Alcohol is distinctly a poison which like other poisons, has certain uses. But the limitations for the use of alcohol should be as strict as the limitations for the use of any other kinds of poisons. Moreover, it is a curiously insidious poison in that it produces effects which seem to have only one antedote alcohol again. Among the medical profession the use of alcohol is emphatically diminishing. The persons of all others that I dread to see enter the operating theatre is the drinker, he is the most dangerous feature in connection with the surgical life.