Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/200



This, as is seen, is an equally instructive table.

To return for a moment to the part played by the so-called moderate use of alcoholic stimulants in the production of fatal forms of liver-disease. As it is, I think, impossible that we as medical men can know too much regarding the probable deleterious effects of mere "nipping," I here subjoin an extract from the registrar-general's tables of the comparative mortality from liver-diseases in different industries, between the ages of twenty-five and sixty-five, in the years 1880-'82, which exhibits the matter in a stronger light than any words of mine can possibly do:

The result here shown is so startling that the registrar-general not inappropriately designates it as "appalling," seeing that the proportion of deaths from liver diseases is in reality six times greater among men exposed to the temptations of "nipping" than in that of all the other industries combined—the actual figures being: For brewers, 1,361; for vintners and other salesmen of wines, spirits, and beers, 1,521; and for waiters and barmen (those most exposed to temptation), no less than 2,305: whereas, for maltsters, who are only concerned with the materials from which intoxicants are manufactured, and not with the intoxicating liquids themselves, the death-rate is only 830. Nothing could be more conclusive of the deleterious effects of so-called moderate drinking on the human constitution than this; for, as all different effects in this world originating in identical causes are but relative, it is readily seen how a lesser proportion of "nipping," though giving rise to lesser results, must nevertheless cause a proportionate amount of cases of disease in the liver and kidneys to those given in the above tables.

Notwithstanding the familiarity of medical men with the fact that many cases of hepatitis, chronically enlarged liver, and cirrhosis are directly traceable to inebriety, few, I fancy, can have