DR. ARTHUR D. BEVAN URGES MEDICAL PROFESSION TO JOIN IN A NATIONAL EFFORT TO ELIMINATE DRINK.

White Ribbon, Volume 24, Issue 283, 18 January 1919, Page 3

DR. ARTHUR D. BEVAN URGES MEDICAL PROFESSION TO JOIN IN A NATIONAL EFFORT TO ELIMINATE DRINK.

At the annual meeting of the Medical Association this year before a great audience in which, besides the representatives of more than 81,000 physic iatis, meml>ers of the Association, were the Surgeon-General of the Army, General Gorgas, and of the Navy, General Braisted, titled representative of foreign powers and the Governor of the State of Illinois, the incoming President, Dr Arthur Dean Bevan, urged the medical profession to join in a national effort to eliminate drink. “As we analyse the facts in a scientific and medical way there can he no doubt of the injurious effects of alcoholic drink on both the physical and mental well-being of our population. There can be no doubt that the greatest single factor that we can control in the interest of the public health of the nation would In* the elimination of alcoholic drink. “In the slow evolution of civilisation, many great wrongs persisted for centuries because people have become so accustomed to them that they were accepted as matters of course. They became so entrenched that it required either centuries of education or a revolution to extirpate or right them. Great epidemics and plagues were accepted as inevitable and as visitations of God. Government by autocratic power and divine right without the consent of the governed has been tolerated. Slavery with its horrors was defended. The unequal rights of women went unquestioned. Anv>ng these great wrongs too long tolerated, none has done more injury to mankind than drink. Events now are moving more rapidly in the convulsions of a worldwar. Women have demanded and will obtain, as they deserve the world over, their equal rights. The course of events is writing the death warrant of autocracy and rule by divine right: and science and education should eliminate not only the plagues and epidemics hut also the curse of drink from the world.

“I want to plead for the united action of the medical profession of this country to secure protection by law against the injury that drink is doing to our people, not as a political measure, hut as the most important pub-

lie health measure that could be secured. In this crisis when we and our allies are fighting not only for ourselves but for humanity and civilisation, we must organise the entire nation in the most eftic lent possible way, and this cannot be done without eliminating drink. Each member or the medical profession, as .111 individual, each county medical society, each state medical society should take an active part in the propaganda against drink, and secure national prohibition, not years from now, but now when it is badly needed and will accomplish so much good, not only for our boys in khaki and blue, but for the nation in arms. And when it has once been done away with, it could no more he resurrected after the war than could he slavery.” —“Scientific Temperance Journal.”