Drunkenness and the physiological effect of alcohol / by Charles Mercier.

  • Mercier, Charles Arthur, 1852-1919.
Date:
[1908?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Drunkenness and the physiological effect of alcohol / by Charles Mercier. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    when the occupations of the day have depleted our stores of energy that we find the liberating effect of alcohol so potent and so advantageous. In the morning there is no need of it, and its absence is no drawback. Then it is not missed. Those of you who have attended an annual meeting of the British Medical Association have, no doubt, received an invitation to a non-alcoholic feast, which is held for the encouragement, the countenance, and the advocacy of the cult of total abstinence from alcohol. It is very significant that this non-alcoholic banquet always takes the form of a breakfast. It is held first thing in the morning. The abstainers, you see, are wise in their own generation. In the morning the stimulus of alcohol is not needed. Its absence is not felt. The speeches, so far as my recollection serves me, are not much more dull, nor is the audience much more bored, than they are at the annual dinner of the Association; but what the funereal gloom of a teetotal public dinner would be, the Medical Temperance Society has wisely not endeavoured to test. In further corroboration of my thesis that the effect of moderate doses of alcohol is to stimulate the mental faculties of those who possess mental faculties, and especially to stimu- late those faculties which some think the highest, such as imagination, fancy, picturesque imagination—the artistic faculties as we may call them—I point to the fact that there has never been one distinguished originator in any branch of art who did not take alcohol, at least in moderation, and many have taken it, alas! in excess. It would be invidious to mention names; and I think it would be unnecessary. The boot is on the other leg. Name, if you can, one great practi- tioner—I think I may go farther, and say one practitioner small or great—in any branch of creative art—poet, painter, novelist, dramatist, musician, or what not—who has not enjoyed his glass of wine, or whiskey if he could get it! More- over I will call attention to the fact, indisputable if lamentable, that it is the great nations, the victorious nations, the pro- gressive nations, the nations that are in the van of civilisation, that are the drinking nations. I don't say that they are great