A HOME FOR DRUNKARDS.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 29, 12 August 1871, Page 3

A HOME FOR DRUNKARDS.

An interesting account is given by a correspondent of the “ New York Tribune” of a visit to the dipsomaniacs at the Binghampton Inebriate Asylum. This institution is situated in a neat, cheerful, homelike little city, nestling in a quiet nook of the Susquehanna valley, and surrounded by some of the most picturesque but not rugged scenery of that State. There is no pretence in this or any other of the inebriate asylums that the appetite for liquor is eradicated and cured, yet that is the belief under which most of the patients enter. They are not habitual drunkards, but are of a nervous temperament, and their disease is a paroxysmal mania seizing them unexpectedly and at irregular periods. Some of them have been known to go weeks, months, and years without drink, firmly resolving and loudly declaring their intention never again to touch alcohol, and then have suddenly been seized again with the madness. They will resort to the meanest artifices, the most abject pleadings, and unheard of extravagances to satisfy their thirst. The mania continues a brief time—weeks with the

stronger, days only with the weaker constitutions —until the system is broken down and exhausted, delirium and sometimes death being the result. The disease is looked upon in the asylum as a mania, of which the only cure is total abstinence. A farm of over 400 acres surrounds the buildings, and furnishes the asylum with a portion of its supplies. It is a bright, cheerful place, and scrupulously clean. There is no paint on the woodwork and no paper on the walls. The whole interior of the buildings has been expensively furnished in oiled black walnut—rooms, staircases, and all. The sleeping apartments, of which there is one for each patient, are about 15 by 18 feet, and each is furnished with a carpet, single bed, table, two chairs, and wardrobe, and supplied with water and heated by a hot-air register. There is not a room in tho asylum that will not compare favorably in point of comfort, neatness, and cleanliness with the best rooms of a New York boarding-house or hotel. There are also billiard-rooms and a gymnasium. Many patients support themselves by their labors at the institution. One gentleman from the Coast Survey Office at Washington daily pores over the whole columns of mysterious figures, and earns in this pleasant retirement the full salary of his place in Washington. Three literary men furnish various styles of matter for their journals and conduct their several departments as well as they could (in view of the difference in their habits in and out of the asylum) in their offices. One architect whose malady outside the asylum makes him a burden to his family is within its walls able to support himself and his wife comfortably. Young lawyers (of whom the asylum has reformed seventeen) pursue their studies with regularity. There are also among the patients four physicians. In their social intercourse no allusion is ever made by the patients to their former habits; it is only with the doctor they talk about their disease and its cure. Only one clergyman has ever been admitted into the asylum, and the only ladies who have ever been there are wives who have faithfully followed and brought their husbands to it. Altogether, the institution seems to be a great success, and there are several others of good repute in other States.