IS DRUNKENNESS A DISEASE

Tuapeka Times, Volume V, Issue 226, 30 May 1872, Page 7

IS DRUNKENNESS A DISEASE

From the insane persistence of drunkards, and the known- power of habit over the faculties, medical men have been inclined to consider habitual drunkenness a disease. Hospitals for inebriates are institutions growing up under this conviction. ' Dr. Parish, of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, in a lecture on " Habit and its L%ws," made some remarks worthy of consideration.

The Doctor maintained that Drunkenness is a disease, and that its victims can no more help it than they can help an attack of the cholera, yellow fever, or consumption. This may be hereditary ; may be planted by the mother *in administering remedies to her infant, etc.

A great error of the day is the manner in which the disease of intemperance is treated. It has become the very bad habit to denounce it as a crime — to rato ■ it among the vices ; and, consequently, its unfortunate victims are cut off from the care and sympathy they deserve, and stand so much in need of, and are looked on as only wanting punishment for their crime. This is all wrong. When the great public, when temperance reformers, look upon drunkenness in its proper light ; when the same provision is made for its thirty thousand victims in Pennsylvania tha is make for the blind, the crazy, or the pnqr ; when &c drunkard is taken by the hand and encouraged, sympathised with and m-ido to feel that he is suffering with a disease, and is not a criminal in the eyes of the moral world, . an important step will be taken in \he true pathway to temperance reform.— * " Gospel of Good and Evil."