Victims of Drink—Young and Old.

Te Aroha News, Volume II, Issue 85, 17 January 1885, Page 5

Victims of Drink— Young and Old.

The experiment of Retreats, instituted under the English Habitual Drunkards Act of 1879, appears to be making steady, if slow, progress. The Inspector of Retreats has is3ued his fourth report on the subject, from which we gather that up to the end of last December only three establishments had been licensed under the Act. These were the Retreat at Hall Court, Cannock ; another at Ricktnansworth, Hertfordshire ; and a third at Westgate. But since that date a fourth house has been opened at Colman Hill, Worcestershire. It is intended for the exclusive treatment of women, the licensed number of which has been fixed at twenty-four. Dipsomania, in all but a few rare cases, is not so much a positive ineradicable vice as a gradual weakening of the will to resist. The dipsomaniac has lost the power to save himself, but it does not follow that he would not feel everlastingly grateful to anyone who should save him in spite of himself. We may take it for granted that the poor patients, who at the time of their admission to the Retreat were drinking their twenty-glasses of spirits daily, had long since overstepped the boundary of self-redemption. Yet the twenty-glass inmates, after a sufficiently long regimen, appear to have resisted the old temptation after their departure. The acquired habi of drinking intoxicating liquors cannot be cast off in a day, and the work of reformation implies a heavy tax not only on the endurance of the invalid, but also on the tact and sympathy of his physician. At the recent meeting of the British Medical Association a most painfully interesing communication was made by Dr. Madden, Physictan to the Hospital for Sick Children, Dublin, on Alcoholism in Childhood and Youth. Dr. Madden gave particulars of a case of marked deleriwn tremens in a boy aged eight. His mother was a drunkard, and he, at the age of six, on discovering a secreted bottle of whisky, showed the hereditary tendency to follow her example. Before admission into the hospital with delerium tremens he had obtained access to a bottle of port wine and almost emptied it. He nearly died from coma, and delirium tremens supervening, he was taken to the hospital. He remained weak in mind and body for nearly a month. He was then sent to a reformatory, and recovered. A second case of juvenile alcoholism in a newsboy, aged eight, was the son of a drunken mother. He was sent for his mother's whisky, and was rewarded with a sip. Dr. Barlow, of London, followed with some powerful facts as to infantile alcoholism, gathered from his experience in the Children's Hospital. He had seen the evil effects of small doses of gin given to babies at the breast for flatulence. He had also found it customary to give quite young children among the poorer classes a daily quantity of beer. He detailed one very striking case— the child of an apparently healthly mother, able to suckle it, and in fair circumstances. From six months old the child was given a teaspoonful of beer twice daily, and from nine months old a teaspoonful of gin in as much water daily. The child died, and was found to have one of the most typically hobnailed livers Dr. Barlow had seen Dr. B. O'Connor bore similar testimony. Thefee (says the " Lancet ") are appalling facts, which give great force to the warning as to the responsibility of prescribing alcohol to children.