Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/259

Rh If next we consider the contributions of recent science to the use of alcohol in its relation to human health and longevity, we are again met with disappointment in our quest for the explanation of its use. Alcohol was formerly very freely used by physicansphysicians [sic] in both surgery and medicine, but faith in its therapeutic powers has now been almost wholly lost. The figures given by Horsley showing the decrease in the use of alcohol in English hospitals and asylums during the last twenty years are exceedingly striking. In surgery alcohol has been replaced by antiseptics and in medicine by milk and eggs. Alcohol has now come to be regarded by physicians not as a cure for disease, but as a prolific cause of it. As an excretory product of the yeast plant, its action upon higher organisms is that of a toxin. Its regular moderate use renders the individual less resistant to disease and its excessive use brings a long list of diseases in its train.

The influence of alcohol upon longevity has now been studied with some thoroughness by physicians and actuaries and some definite results have been gained, although here much work needs to be done. The results show at any rate that alcohol does not increase longevity and hence we have here again no clue to the world-wide desire for it. Robert Mackenzie Moore, actuary of the United Kingdom Temperance and General Provident Institute, in a recent report based upon sixty years' experience of that company in the insurance of the lives of abstainers and non-abstainers (the latter being moderate drinkers and good risks and belonging to the same class and following the same occupations as the former), found that in respect to longevity the abstainers showed a marked superiority over the non-abstainers throughout the whole period of life for every class of policies and for both sexes, however tested. For instance, at the age of 30 the expectation of life for the non-abstainers is 35.1 years; for the abstainers, 38.8 years, a difference of nearly 11 per cent. At the age of 40, the percentage of difference is the same. Another very thorough and impartial investigation has been made by Mr. Edward B. Phelps on the mortality due to alcohol. It is based on the testimony of the medical directors of three prominent life-insurance companies of America. Mr. Phelps's conclusion is that 8 per cent, of all deaths of adults in the United States are due to alcohol.

If we turn finally to the social relations of men in our search for an explanation for the universal desire for alcohol, our reward is even less. Alcohol indeed encourages sociability, but it would be hard to show that this in itself is a benefit proportional to the desire for it, and we find in connection with its use a long list of social evils, such as poverty, crime and racial degeneracy. These evils are connected for the most part with the excessive use of alcohol and consequently they interest us only indirectly here; but it would appear to be one more disadvantage to be attributed to alcohol that its moderate use is apt to