A COFFEE DRUNKARD.

Thames Star, Volume LXV, Issue 18241, 15 July 1931, Page 1

A COFFEE DRUNKARD.

PATIENT HAS 21 PINTS A DAY. HORROR OF. ALCOHOL. At the last sitting of the Vienna Society of Physicians, Professor Hermann Schlesinger introduced a patient, aged 40, who was an unusual sort of drunkard; he consumed daily 21 pints of coffee with milk. He had come to the clinic to be cured of this strange passion, which cost him his whole income. His father had been a drunkard of the usual type and the boy had been filled with a horror of alcohol, as the father had ruined his family through his passion. The boy, however, inherited the desire for drink, and took to coffee and milk. Even at the age of 13 he had increased his three pints a day to seven or eight. He told the members that his yearly consumption amounted to some 000 gallons for which he used 7 ewt. of sugar and 90 pounds of coffee-beans. Strange to say, neither his stomach has suffered from the surfeit, nor has he grown fat. The doctors have now succeeded in bringing his allowance down to about four pints of cuffee a day.