Searchlights on Health eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 507 pages of information about Searchlights on Health.

Searchlights on Health eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 507 pages of information about Searchlights on Health.

12.  THE ACCIDENTAL OR SOCIAL DRUNKARD is yet on safe ground.  He has not acquired the dangerous craving for liquor.  It is only on special occasions that he yields to excessive indulgence; sometimes in meeting a friend, or at some political blow-out.  On extreme occasions he will indulge until he becomes a helpless victim, and usually as he grows older occasions will increase, and step by step he will be lead nearer to the precipice of ruin.

13.  THE PERIODICAL OR SPASMODIC DRUNKARD, with whom it is always the unexpected which occurs, and who at intervals exacts from his accumulated capital the usury of as prolonged a spree as his nerves and stomach will stand.  Science is inclined to charitably label this specimen of man a sort of a physiologic puzzle, to be as much pitied as blamed.  Given the benefit of every doubt, when he starts off on one of his hilarious tangents, he becomes a howling nuisance; if he has a family, keeps them continually on the ragged edge of apprehension, and is unanimously pronounced a “holy terror” by his friends.  His life and future is an uncertainty.  He is unreliable and cannot be long trusted.  Total reformation is the only hope, but it rarely is accomplished.

14.  THE SOT.—­A blunt term that needs no defining, for even the children comprehend the hopeless degradation it implies.  Laws to restrain and punish him are framed; societies to protect and reform him are organized, and mostly in vain.  He is prone in life’s very gutter; bloated, reeking and polluted with the doggery’s slops and filth.  He can fall but a few feet lower, and not until he stumbles into an unmarked, unhonored grave, where kind mother earth and the merciful mantle of oblivion will cover and conceal the awful wreck he made of God’s own image.  To the casual observer, the large majority of the community, these three phases, at whose vagaries many laugh, and over whose consequences millions mourn, comprehend intoxication and its results, from the filling of the cup to its shattering fall from the nerveless hand, and this is the end of the matter.  Would to God that it were! for at that it would be bad enough.  But it is not, for wife, children and friends must suffer and drink the cup of trouble and sorrow to its dregs.

* * * * *

OBJECT LESSONS OF THE EFFECTS OF ALCOHOL AND CIGARETTE SMOKING.

By Prof.  George Henkle, who personally made the post-mortem examinations and drew the following illustrations from the diseased organs just as they appeared when first taken from the bodies of the unfortunate victims.

[Illustration:  THE STOMACH of an habitual drinker of alcoholic stimulants, showing the ulcerated condition of the mucous membrane, incapacitating this important organ for digestive functions.]

[Illustration:  THE STOMACH (interior view) of a healthy person with the first section of the small intestines.]

[Illustration:  THE LIVER of a drunkard who died of Cirrhosis of the liver, also called granular liver, or “gin drinker’s liver.”  The organ is much shrunken and presents rough, uneven edges, with carbuncular non-suppurative sores.  In this self-inflicted disease the tissues of the liver undergo a cicatrical retraction which strangulates and partly destroys the parenchyma of the liver.]

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Searchlights on Health from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.