human
What do you mean?
gpt
I saw something just now that looks very suspicious.
human
What?
gpt
I came here with Mrs. Abercrombie a little while ago, and was engaged in helping her, when I saw her face grow deadly pale. Following her eyes, I observed them fixed on the general, who was chatting gayly and taking wine with a lady.
human
What! taking wine did you say?
gpt
Yes; anything strange in that?
human
Why so? What does it mean?
gpt
It means sorrow and heartbreak.
human
You surprise and pain me. I thought of the lady by his side, not of the glass of wine in his hand.
gpt
You know something of the general's life and habits?
human
Yes.
gpt
He has not been intemperate, I hope?
human
Yes.
gpt
Oh, I am pained to hear you say so.
human
Drink is his besetting sin, the vice that has more than once come near leading to his dismissal from the army. He is one of the men who cannot use wine or spirits in moderation. In consequence of some diseased action of the nutritive organs brought on by drink, he has lost the power of self-control when under the influence of alcoholic stimulation. He is a dypso-maniac. A glass of wine or brandy to him is like the match to a train of powder. I don't wonder, knowing what I do about General Abercrombie, that his wife grew deadly pale to-night when she saw him raise a glass to his lips.
gpt
Has he been abstaining for any length of time?
human
Yes; for many months he has kept himself free. I am intimate with an officer who told me all about him. When not under the influence of drink, the general is one of the kindest-hearted men in the world. To his wife he is tender and indulgent almost to a fault, if that were possible. But liquor seems to put the devil into him. Drink drowns his better nature and changes him into a half-insane fiend. I am told that he came near killing his wife more than once in a drunken phrensy.
gpt
You pain me beyond measure. Poor lady! I don't wonder that the life went out of her so suddenly, nor at the terror I saw in her face. Can nothing be done? Has he no friends here who will draw him out of the supper-room and get him away before he loses control of himself?
human
It is too late. If he has begun to drink, it is all over. You might as well try to draw off a wolf who has tasted blood.
gpt
Does he become violent? Are we going to have a drunken scene?
human
Oh no; we need apprehend nothing of that kind. I never heard of his committing any public folly. The devil that enters into him is not a rioting, boisterous fiend, but quiet, malignant, suspicious and cruel.
gpt
Suspicious? Of what?
human
Of everybody and everything. His brother officers are in league against him; his wife is regarded with jealousy; your frankest speech covers in his view some hidden and sinister meaning. You must be careful of your attentions to Mrs. Abercrombie to-night, for he will construe them adversely, and pour out his wrath on her defenceless head when they are alone.
gpt
This is frightful, was answered.
human
I never heard of such a case.
gpt
Never heard of a drunken man assaulting his wife when alone with her, beating, maiming or murdering her?
human
Oh yes, among the lowest and vilest. But we are speaking now of people in good society--people of culture and refinement.
gpt
Culture and social refinements have no influence over a man when the fever of intoxication is upon him. He is for the time an insane man, and subject to the influx and control of malignant influences. Hell rules him instead of heaven.
human
It is awful to think of. It makes me shudder.
gpt
We know little of what goes on at home after an entertainment like this, said the other.
human
It all looks so glad and brilliant. Smiles, laughter, gayety, enjoyment, meet you at every turn. Each one is at his or her best. It is a festival of delight. But you cannot at this day give wine and brandy without stint to one or two or three hundred men and women of all ages, habits, temperaments and hereditary moral and physical conditions without the production of many evil consequences. It matters little what the social condition may be; the hurt of drink is the same. The sphere of respectability may and does guard many. Culture and pride of position hold others free from undue sensual indulgence. But with the larger number the enticements of appetite are as strong and enslaving in one grade of society as in another, and the disturbance of normal conditions as great. And so you see that the wife of an intoxicated army officer or lawyer or banker may be in as much danger from his drunken and insane fury, when alone with him and unprotected, as the wife of a street-sweeper or hod-carrier.
gpt
I have never thought of it in that way.
human
No, perhaps not. Cases of wife-beating and personal injuries, of savage and frightful assaults, of terrors and sufferings endured among the refined and educated, rarely if ever come to public notice. Family pride, personal delicacy and many other considerations seal the lips in silence. But there are few social circles in which it is not known that some of its members are sad sufferers because of a husband's or a father's intemperance, and there are many, many families, alas! which have always in their homes the shadow of a sorrow that embitters everything. They hide it as best they can, and few know or dream of what they endure.
gpt
Your professional experience will corroborate this, Dr. Angier.
human
Corroborate what?
gpt
We were speaking of the effects of intemperance on the more cultivated and refined classes, and I said that it mattered little as to the social condition; the hurt of drink was the same and the disturbance of normal conditions as great in one class of society as in another, that a confirmed inebriate, when under the influence of intoxicants, lost all idea of respectability or moral responsibility, and would act out his insane passion, whether he were a lawyer, an army officer or a hod-carrier. In other words, that social position gave the wife of an inebriate no immunity from personal violence when alone with her drunken husband.
human
Have you given much attention to the pathology of drunkenness?
gpt
Some; not a great deal. The subject is one of the most perplexing and difficult we have to deal with.
human
You class intemperance with diseases, do you not?
gpt
Yes; certain forms of it. It may be hereditary or acquired like any other disease. One man may have a pulmonary, another a bilious and another a dypso-maniac diathesis, and an exposure to exciting causes in one case is as fatal to health as in the other. If there exist a predisposition to consumption, the disease will be developed under peculiar morbific influences which would have no deleterious effect upon a subject not so predisposed. The same law operates as unerringly in the inherited predisposition to intemperance. Let the man with a dypso-maniac diathesis indulge in the use of intoxicating liquors, and he will surely become a drunkard. There is no more immunity for him than for the man who with tubercles in his lungs exposes himself to cold, bad air and enervating bodily conditions.
human
A more serious view of the case, doctor, than is usually taken.
gpt
I know, but a moment's consideration--to say nothing of observed facts--will satisfy any reasonable man of its truth.
human
What do you mean by dypso-mania as a medical term?
gpt
The word, replied Dr. Angier,
human
What an awful disease!
gpt
You may well call it an awful disease, returned the doctor, who, under the influence of a few glasses of wine, was more inclined to talk than usual.
human
It has been named the mother of diseases. Its death-roll far outnumbers that of any other. When it has fairly seized upon a man, no influence seems able to hold him back from the indulgence of his passion for drink. To gratify this desire he will disregard every consideration affecting his standing in society, his pecuniary interests and his domestic relations, while the most frightful instances of the results of drinking have no power to restrain him. A hundred deaths from this cause, occurring under the most painful and revolting circumstances, fail to impress him with a sense of his own danger. His understanding will be clear as to the cases before him, and he will even condemn the self-destructive acts which he sees in others, but will pass, as it were, over the very bodies of these victims, without a thought of warning or a sense of fear, in order to gratify his own ungovernable propensity. Such is the power of this terrible malady.
gpt
Has the profession found a remedy?
human
No; the profession is almost wholly at fault in its treatment. There are specialists connected with insane and reformatory institutions who have given much attention to the subject, but as yet we have no recorded line of treatment that guarantees a cure.
gpt
Except, said one of his listeners,
human
You do not cure a thirsty man by withholding water.
gpt
The thirsty man's desire for water is healthy; and if you withhold it, you create a disease that will destroy him, was answered.
human
Not so the craving for alcohol. With every new supply the craving is increased, and the man becomes more and more helpless in the folds of an enslaving appetite. Is it not true, doctor, that with few exceptions all who have engaged in treating inebriates agree that only in entire abstinence is cure possible?
gpt
Well, yes; you are probably right there, Dr. Angler returned, with some professional reserve.
human
In the most cases isolation and abstinence are no doubt the only remedies, or, to speak more correctly, the only palliatives. As for cure, I am one of the skeptics. If you have the diathesis, you have the danger of exposure always, as in consumption.
gpt
An occasion like this, remarked the other,
human
Yes, yes.
gpt
There are over three hundred persons here to-night.
human
Not less.
gpt
In so large a company, taking society as we have it to-day, is it likely that we have none here with a hereditary or acquired love of drink?
human
Scarcely possible,
gpt
How large do you think the percentage?
human
I have no means of knowing; but if we are to judge by the large army of drunkards in the land, it must be fearfully great.
gpt
Then we cannot invite to our houses fifty or a hundred guests, and give them as much wine and spirits as they care to drink, without seriously hurting some of them. I say nothing of the effect upon unvitiated tastes; I refer only to those with diseased appetites who made happen to be present.
human
It will be bad for them, certainly. Such people should stay at home.
gpt
THE doctor likes his glass of wine,
human
Is that so?
gpt
Didn't you observe his heightened color and the gleam in his eyes?
human
I noticed something unusual in his manner, but did not think it the effect of wine.
gpt
He is a reticent man, with considerable of what may be called professional dignity, and doesn't often let himself down to laymen as he did just now.
human
There wasn't much letting down, that I could see.
gpt
Perhaps not; but professional pride is reserved and sensitive in some persons. It hasn't much respect for the opinions of non-experts, and is chary of discussion with laymen. Dr. Angier is weak, or peculiar if you please, in this direction. I saw that he was annoyed at your reply to his remark that you do not cure a thirsty man by withholding water. It was a little thing, but it showed his animus. The argument was against him, and it hurt his pride. As I said, he likes his glass of wine, and if he does not take care will come to like it too well. A doctor has no more immunity from dypso-mania than his patient. The former may inherit or acquire the disease as well as the latter.
human
How does the doctor know that he has not from some ancestor this fatal diathesis? Children rarely if ever betray to their children a knowledge of the vices or crimes of their parents. The death by consumption, cancer or fever is a part of oral family history, but not so the death from intemperance. Over that is drawn a veil of silence and secresy, and the children and grandchildren rarely if ever know anything about it. There may be in their blood the taint of a disease far more terrible than cancer or consumption, and none to give them warning of the conditions under which its development is certain.
gpt
Is it not strange, was replied,
human
It is a little surprising. I have noticed, now that you speak of it, his habit in this respect.
gpt
He might as well, on his own theory, prescribe thin clothing and damp air to one whose father or mother had died of consumption as alcoholic stimulants to one, who has the taint of dypso-mania in his blood. In one case as in the other the disease will almost surely be developed. This is common sense, and something that can be understood by all men.
human
And yet, strange to say, the very men who have in charge the public health, the very men whose business it is to study the relations between cause and effect in diseases, are the men who in far too many instances are making the worst possible prescriptions for patients in whom even the slightest tendency to inebriety may exist hereditarily. We have, to speak plainly, too many whisky doctors, and the harm they are doing is beyond calculation. A physician takes upon himself a great responsibility when, without any knowledge of the antecedents of a patient or the stock from which he may have come, he prescribes whisky or wine or brandy as a stimulant. I believe thousands of drunkards have been made by these unwise prescriptions, against which I am glad to know some of the most eminent men in the profession, both in this country and Europe, have entered a solemn protest.
gpt
There is one thing in connection with the disease of intemperance, replied the other,
human
You put the case sharply.
gpt
Too sharply?
human
Perhaps not. No good ever comes of calling evil things by dainty names or veiling hard truth under mild and conservative phrases. In granting men a license to dispense alcohol in every variety of enticing forms and in a community where a large percentage of the people have a predisposition to intemperance, consequent as well on hereditary taint as unhealthy social conditions, society commits itself to a disastrous error the fruit of which is bitterer to the taste than the ashen core of Dead Sea apples.
gpt
What about Dead Sea apples? asked Mr. Elliott, who came up at the moment and heard the last remark. The two gentlemen were pew-holders in his church. Mr. Elliott's countenance was radiant. All his fine social feelings were active, and he was enjoying a
human
if not