Literary Notices. cxxxi 



excessive drinkers in the United States, in addition to the victims to 

 morphine, chloral, and other narcotic drugs, — all centres of degener- 

 ation and the most unsanitary physiological and psychical conditions. 

 There are over a million unrecognized inebriates who are the most 

 defective, dangerous, and degenerate classes. The superstition of 

 personal freedom permits this army of inebriates to go on increasing 

 the burden of their families and building up centres of physical and 

 mental degeneration. Public sentiment should not permit one to be- 

 come an inebriate, or tolerate him after that stage, unless under legal 

 guardianship and restriction until he recovers. 



M. Fere^ describes as mechanical drunkenness a state, corre- 

 sponding in its symptoms to alcoholic drunkenness, developed in cer- 

 tain subjects under the influence of forced movements and muscular 

 exertions. He observed this in a person who had since died from 

 general paralysis, and that prior to any other psychical or motor phe- 

 nomena. The individual was taken for the first time with this apparent 

 drunkenness in an accession of excitement after hunting. Afterward, 

 consequent on every fresh day with the hounds, the drunken symp- 

 toms reappeared. Are these motory intoxications important in the 

 early diagnosis of general paralysis ? 



Morphinomania and Cocainomania. — J. L. Maxwell, of London, - 

 recalls the conclusions of Dr. Valentine, after thirty-one years of 

 practice in India, that to opium is due a large per centage of mortality 

 among children, crime, murder, and disease. More than three- 

 fourths of between 800 and 900 prisoners in Jeypore Central Prison, 

 fully twenty-five years ago, used opium, quite one-half of them to 

 excess. Maxwell says 100,000 persons commit suicide by opium 

 every year in China. McReddie, of Hardoi,'^ states that, in that 

 limited district, of the 180 suicides in three years, 97 were from 

 opium, 80 per cent, of these being women. Opium inquests are com- 

 mon in Calcutta now;^ there is one almost every day. W. B. Brooks, 

 of Dallas, Tex.,'' argues that the morphine habit is sometimes the 

 only cause of some severe forms of hysteria, neuralgia, chorea, asthma 

 and other nerve disorders; that morphinists, however confident of 



1 Z(? Btdletin-mcdical, October 8, 1S92. 

 "^ LondoJt Lancet, January 28, 1893. 

 ^Indian Medical Gazette, June, 1891. 

 ^London Lancet, January 28, 1893. 

 ^ Texas Courier-Record, September, 1892. 



