Page:Alcohol, a Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine.djvu/104



Although nearly all of the foremost scientific investigators of the effects of alcohol upon the body have lost faith in the old views of the usefulness of alcoholic liquors as remedial agencies a considerable proportion of the medical profession do not seem yet to have learned how to treat disease without recourse to the alcohol therapy. This is largely due to the fact that the new thought has not yet crystallized to any large extent in the medical text-books, and also to the widely variant views held by professors of medicine.

The medical use of alcohol has been, and still is, the great bulwark of the liquor traffic. The user of alcoholics as beverages always excuses himself, if hard pressed by abstainers, upon the ground that they must be of service or doctors would not recommend them so frequently. In all prohibitory amendment, and no-license campaigns, the cry of "Useful as Medicine" has been the hardest for temperance workers to meet, for they have felt that they had to admit the statement as true, knowing nothing to the contrary. Indeed, thousands of those who advocate the prohibition of the sale of 96