Page:McCosh, John - Advice to Officers in India (1856).djvu/185

 not a hydropathist. I believe much harm has been done by indiscriminate abstinence, and consider the one extreme as hurtful as the other. The water drinker in avoiding the diseases of the intemperate contracts an opposite train; no less intractable and no less fatal the asthenic and chronic instance of the plethoric and acute. Some stimulus is actually necessary in the hot weather when the heart labours and the vital energy is exhausted, and I have recovered patients from the brink of the grave, and was once so recovered myself (thanks to a kind confrere) by judiciously ministered wine glasses of beer repeated every hour.

Fortunately intoxication is now a rare vice in India: the old system of hard living has been exploded, the hard livers have died off or taken themselves off to safer quarters. It is a very rare exception to see an officer the worse of liquor at a mess table, and he is a marked man who is so. Nothing is more injurious to an officer's character than sottishness: nothing more quickly estranges his comrades, and no misdemeanour is more severely punished.

Sodawater is freely used by old residents, and I think is carried to a hurtful extent. It is often taken under the impression that it possesses alkaline properties, as its name indicates, and consequently that it is good for acidity of stomach,