SOCIAL REFORM.

White Ribbon, Volume 21, Issue 246, 18 December 1915, Page 10

SOCIAL REFORM.

ALCOHOL AND VENEREAL DISEASES. The question of the relation between drink and disease is not new to any of us; but we have lately had striking and repeated evidence of the close connection between alcohol and some of the most terrible scourges which afflict humanity. Before the Royal Comm ssion on \ enereal Disease which sat recently, many of our leading medical men, with expert knowledge and widest experience, have testified that the use of alcohol “multiplies the number c f venereal patients, aggravates their matadies, and mikes them more difficult, and in some cases almost impossible to cure.” Sir Tnomas Barlow, President of the Royal College of Physicians, declared that alcoholism brings out the latent forms of these 1 diseases, making their treatment muc h more dittie ult; that salvarsan, used as a remedy, is a most dangerous one foi alcoholic patients, and that if you cut rely stop their alcohol you often have more satisfactory results. “From first to last,” said Sir Thomas Barlow, “the influence of alcohol with regard to these venereal diseases is most dangerous.” Lleut*Col. Cibbard, Head of the Military Hospital at Rochester Row, London, said that most of the* patients admitted, if asked, that they became infected after having taken too much drink; he also expressed the opinion that increased temperanc e in the Army was a great cause of the redu< tion in venereal disease. Major L. W. Harrison, Pathologist to the same hospital, attr.buted the decrease to the provision of occupations and amusement other than canteens, which, he said, tends to make them better soldiers. Sir Victor Horsley pointed out that alcohol diminishes the power of resistance to disease in the human body, and therefore not only renders a man more liable to infection, but aggravates the disease when incurred. A total abstainer is less likely to become infected, owing to his higher power to resist. Mr F. W. Mott, Pathologist to the Ixmdon County Council’s Asylums, stated that men so often took some drink, lost their judgment and then went astray. Alcoholism makes them more liable to disease, and much less likely to be cured.

Dr Armand Routh, Consulting Ob stetric Physician to the Charing ( ross Hospital and the Samaritan Free Hospital, declared that alcohol will sometimes revive an old complaint that is supposed to have been cured for years and years. Other doctors testified to the same effect and it was said that after very extensive enquiries made in many countries, there was good reason to believe that eighty per cent, of the men who fall victims to these diseases i have done so under the influence of some kind of alcohol It should be remembered that these .ire preventable diseases, the result of immorality, which goes hand in hand with intemperance, and the lesson is plain, that we must look to absolute purity of life, both of men and women, reinforced by total abstinence from intoxicants, for an untainted parenthood, which alone can produce a healthy and virile race, resolute in will, clear of brain, steadfast to purpose, and capable of high ideals for the progress of humanity.- S.B. “White Ribbon,” Kngland.