Page:Alcohol, a Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine.djvu/425

Rh physicians, collected by the Voice, were read, condemning such a course. A resolution of protest was also adopted."—Sel.

"For nineteen years we lived with a physician whose success may be estimated from this one item: He had between 1,600 and 1,700 labor cases, and never once lost the mother, and only twice the child, and what seems still more remarkable never used instruments. When other physicians, as often happened, would come to him to know how he did it, he always answered, 'A woman will do anything if you only encourage her.' Nor was obstetrics his specialty—he had none.

"In a fifteen years' practice in Chicago and New York, where these diseases are so very fatal, and he was much sought after to treat them, he did not lose a case of scarlet fever, diphtheria or cholera infantum which he managed himself, and saved many a one where he was called in consultation, or after some other physician. Now when such a man after an experience more than fifty years long and as wide as the continent, gives it as his unqualified opinion that wines, beers, liquors of every  kind, alcohol itself, are not medicines and should never be used as such, for  reasons, not to mention moral, is not his opinion entitled to a hearing? Isn't it probable it weighs more than the doctor's you were just quoting ? Is it too great a risk to act upon it?"—Pacific Ensign.

"A lady, Mrs. A., tenderly nurtured, refined, cultured, moving in an influential position, belonged to a family in whom the tendency to intemperance existed. Realizing the danger, she, for seven years of her married life, adhered to total abstinence. Illness came, and the doctor ordered wine; and her husband, deaf to her arguments, insisted on her taking it. She fell into habits of intemperance. Her husband died, and for a time she pulled up and trained as a hospital nurse; but temptation prevailed, and she fell from bad to worse. Loving hands received her time after time, and at last placed her in an Inebriate Home. For a short time she did well, but soon became un-manageable. After another desperate period she entered a