ALCOHOL AND INSANITY.

Southern Cross, Volume 7, Issue 27, 15 October 1898, Page 4

ALCOHOL AND INSANITY.

At the last annual meeting of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum for the Insane, bn Monday week, Dr Clouston the physician-superintendent, submitted his report. The following is the reference to alcohol in connection •with insanity :— ‘ They should all like to believe that improved sanitary ■conditions, better wages and better food for body and mind, more rational amusements, the exercise of more self-control in the use of alcoholic stimulants and otherwise, and, generally, the better understanding of, and more general obedience to, natural laws, were having as good effect on our brain soundness as they undoubtedly were having on the general health of the community. In one respect, however, they could not boast, for the proportion of cases attributed to the excessive uses of alcohol as a cause of their malady was twenty-four per cent for both sexes, the women standing at sixteen sper cent, and the men at thirty-two per cent. These proportions were actually in excess of the usual figures in previous years, The salutary influence on thebrain of ‘moderation in nil things’ had clearly not yet reached ail the population, and could not be claimed as one of the causes of lessened insanity production for last year. Dr Clousten firmly believed that the standard of insanity of any people could be raised by such means, not only in the restricted sense of a lesser e I amount of technical insanity, but in the larger and more important sense of a better general brain power, le.-s vice, less crime, and a higher self-respect in individual and social life. There was the more need, therefore, for society to actively and a'l measures that made for sanity in Jb large sense in the community, and, accordingly, for full responsibility in its members.’ Dr R chard Maurice Burke, in a ■recent report of the asylum for the insane in London, Canada, makes the following statements concerning the use of alcohol in that institution : ‘As we have given up the use of alcohol, we have needed and used less opium, and chloral; and as we have discontinued the use of alcohol, opium, and chloral, we have needed and used less seclusion and restraint, I have, during the year just closed, carefully watched the effect of the alcohol given; and the progress of cases where in former years it would have been given, and I am morally certain that the alcohol used during the last year did no good. With humiliation I am forced to admit that in the recent past my noble profession has been to an alarming extent, and is still too much so, guilty of producing many drunkards in the land directly •or indirectly by the reckless and wholesale manner in which so many of its members have prescribed alcoholic stimulants in their daily practice for all the aches and pains, agues and chills, coughs and colds, inflammation and consumption, fever and chills, at the hour of birth, and at the time of death, and all intermediate points of life, to induce sleep and to promote wakefulness, and for all the real or imaginary ills that ■come under the eyes of our great descendants.”—Temperance Mirror (May).