Liter a? y Notices. iii 



mania at sixteen, transition to complete idiocy and probable extinc- 

 tion of family. 



The profession and the public believe that inebriety is a disease. 

 They now believe it can be successfully treated and that it ought to 

 be treated, not only for the good of the inebriate, but for the welfare 

 of his descendants. They have now the knowledge that precedes 

 wise action. 



Drunkenness is unpopular; inebriety is on the decline; dipso- 

 mania is dangerous to the drunkard's descendants, as well as detri- 

 mental to himself. 



Medicine has given to the world the substantial basis of a new 

 reformation. It has sounded the alarm : it offers the remedy, and, on 

 this score, we think humanity is on the road to safety. 



This is one of the jewels we place in the crown of Nineteenth 

 Century progress. We give it freely to the cause we crown without 

 copyright, letters patent or secret process. 



We need not now go deeply into the pathology of chronic alcoho- 

 lism, but cursorily glancing at the subject we have only to recall the 

 findings of Virchow, Richardson, Horsley, Percy and Binz, of water 

 decreased and fibrine changes in the blood, sometimes quite fluid, at 

 others, coagulated, pure alcohol in the tissues, fatty globules in the 

 circulation, fibrinous clots and excrescences in the vessels, vascular 

 dilations, anaemia, deficient haemoglobin, of old and excessive 

 alcoholics. 



Nor need we dwell upon other destructive and degenerative 

 changes, which, like the annihilated phagocytes of alcoholized persons 

 to which their well-known lack of resistance to general morbific influ- 

 ences is due, are secondary to the poison. We have to treat these 

 conditions as sequehz. This fact and the other prominent fact that 

 alcohol abstracts fluid from the tissues of an organism whose very 

 nerve cell is bathed in lymph, whose cerebro-spinal axis, as Oberstein- 

 er tells us, lies in a sea of lymph, an organism to which water is the 

 sine qua noti of life, give us the chart and compass of our course ; and 

 the polar star is the care and cure of the damaged brain, the brain and 

 associate spinal and ganglionic system from whence originate the illus- 

 ions, the hallucinations, delusions, anaethesias, paraesthesias, hyperaes- 

 thesias and hyperalgaesias or the peculiar polyaesthesias of these cases. 

 All of these sensory troubles, together with the well known motor 

 symptoms, the motor paresis, muscular tremor, twitchings and inco- 

 ordination, the paresis of the cortical areas of the brain, where the 

 volitions center and whence they proceed, impaired and vitiated, in 



