Page:Alcohol, a Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine.djvu/380

372 should be as strict as that of any other kind of poison. It is not an appetizer, and even in small quantities it hinders digestion. The use of alcohol is emphatically diminishing in hospital practise."—, Surgeon to King Edward.

"If during the last quarter of a century I have prescribed almost no alcohol in the treatment of disease, it is because I have found very little reason for its use, and it seemed to me that my patients got on better without it."—, Dean of the Medical School of Liverpool University.

"With the increase of medical knowledge and with the increase of medical observation, it is shown every year that the value of alcohol as a drug has been enormously over-estimated. It is a very poor agent, and only in common use because it is so easily obtained. The medical profession is using it less and less, because they appreciate it now at its true value. Personally I never order it, because I believe patients recover better without it."—, Surgeon to London Hospital.

"The same care and discrimination should be given to the prescribing of alcohol as to the most deadly drug with which we have to deal. In looking at the report of Radcliffe In- firmary for the past month I see that in dealing with twenty- five cases I ordered alcohol costing exactly 1¾ pence."—, President British Medical Association, 1904.

"In England at present the use of large doses of alcohol seems to have greatly gone out of hospital practise, and opin- ion is certainly growing that not even small doses are re- quired. Diseases of the stomach, liver, heart, and kidneys have appeared to me, in my practise, to be much more sat- isfactorily treated without beer, wines, or spirits."—, Consulting Physician to the Metropolitan Hos- pital, London.

"Alcohol is a functional and tissue poison, and there is no proper or necessary use for it as medicine."—, Vice-President London Pathological Society.