Page:Alcohol, a Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine.djvu/420

412 usual dependence—the family doctor. If the baby has croup fold a strip of flannel or a soft napkin lengthwise, dip into very hot water, and apply to the child's throat. Repeat and continue the application till relief is had, which will be almost at once. For toothache, or colic, or a threatened lung congestion, the hot-water treatment will be found promptly efficacious if resorted to. Nature needs only a little assistance at the first sign of trouble to rally quickly in the average healthy child, and often hot water is all that is wanted."


 * —Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke, whose valuable paper on "The Evolution of the Mind" appeared in the December number of the Journal of Hygiene, in a recent report of the Asylum for the Insane in London, Canada, makes the following statement concerning the use of alcohol in the institution over which he presides:—

"As we have given up the use of alcohol, we have needed and used less opium and chloral; and as we have discontinued the use of alcohol, opium and chloral, we have needed and used less seclusion and restraint. I have, during the year just closed, carefully watched the effect of the alcohol given, and the progress of cases where, in former years, it would have been given, and I am morally certain that the alcohol used during the past year did no good. With humiliation I am forced to admit that in the recent past my noble profession has been to an alarming extent, and is still too much so, guilty of producing many drunkards in the land, directly or indirectly, by the reckless and wholesale manner in which so many of its members have prescribed alcoholic stimulants in their daily practice for all the aches and pains, coughs and colds, inflammations and consumptions, fevers and chills, at the hour of birth and at the time of death, and all intermediate points of