LITERARY NOTICES. 



Alcohol Inebriety. 



The marked interest recently awakened in scientific circles re- 

 specting the pathology of alcoholism and particularly its hereditary le- 

 sions of the nervous system warrant us in quoting quite fully from a 

 recent leader in the Universal Medical Journal, by Norman Kerr, 

 M. D. 



" Prominence has been given to it in medical journals, and I have 

 already had occasion to call the attention of our readers to it in this 

 journal. In a series of articles^ the question has been moderately and 

 dispassionately considered. Twenty years ago it was rare to see a 

 woman drinking at the bar of a public-house in Britain. Now it is a 

 common sight. At an inquest held recently in London on the body 

 of a woman who had died suddenly on the threshhold of her home, 

 after returning from a public-house where she had gone for liquor by 

 6 o'clock in the morning, I had occasion to testify that I had never 

 seen so much female drunkenness before. Morning, noon, and night 

 such houses had been thronged, largely by women ; many with infants 

 at the breast, who were treated by the wretched mothers to sips of 

 rum or gin. On the streets were groups of from three to six women 

 (many of them young), going about from public-house to public-house 

 to expend in liquor all the money they could jomtly provide for their 

 weekly dissipation. The coroner, Dr. Danford Thomas, in confirm- 

 ing this evidence, said that he had lately held an increased number of 

 inquests on intemperate females. In London, during 1891, there had 

 been an increase of 500 apprehensions of females for drunkenness. 

 In Glasgow- there were 10,500 women arrested for drunkenness and 

 allied offenses in one year. Four thousand women were responsible for 

 this long tale of convictions, no fewer than 450 of whom having been 

 sent to jail for from six to thirty-four separate terms. Of some female 

 inebriates in England and Ireland there have been hundreds of drunken 

 commitments. Of criminals convicted over ten times (these are 



1 Brit. Med. Jour., Oct. I and 8, 1892, and other journals. 

 "^Jbid, Oct. I, 1892, 



