Page:Alcohol, a Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine.djvu/389

Rh "Doctor Frick, an eminent teacher of medicine in Zurich, Switzerland, and Doctor von Speyer, of the University of Berne, have made statistical studies of cases treated with and without alcohol, and have analyzed the effects of spirits as medicinal agents to check and antagonize disease, and assert very positively, that alcohol is a dangerous and exceedingly doubtful remedy. Doctor Meyer, of the University of Gottenburg, Doctor Möbius, of Leipsic, and Doctor Wehberg, of Dusseldorf, are equally prominent physicians who have taken the same position, and are equally emphatic in their denunciations of the current beliefs concerning alcohol in medicine.—Journal A. M. A., January 6, 1900.

Dr. H. D. Didama, Dean of the Medical College of Syracuse University, Syracuse, N. Y., said in January, 1898, in the Voice:—

"For many years after my graduation at Albany, in 1846, I prescribed alcohol, and for twenty years, while occupying the chair of professor of the science and art of medicine in the College of Medicine of Syracuse University, I followed in my lectures—often reluctantly and usually afar off, but still I followed—the almost unanimous teaching of authors, ancient and modern, and the professors in the medical schools.

"Convinced that a great number of the diseases I was called to treat owed their existence or aggravation to the use, in alleged moderation, of alcoholic beverages, and that not in a few instances this use was commenced and even continued by the advice of the medical attendants; convinced also by the published experiments of many acute observers at home and abroad, and by my own observations, that almost all diseases could be managed as well if not better by the non-use of alcohol, and satisfied from the communications of some brother practitioners that the fatality in certain specified diseases was not delayed, to say the least, by the employment of increasing and enormous doses of wine, whisky and brandy,