THE ELIMINATION BY ALCOHOL 295 



excessive drinkers. Must we conclude, then, that alcoholism only 

 very rarely destroys its victims ? 



491. The statistics of the Registrar - General are compiled 

 almost exclusively from medical certificates of death. When I 

 turn over the counterfoils of my old books of death certificates, I 

 find, here and there but very seldom, the word ' alcoholism.' The 

 term implies that the person whose end is recorded drank himself 

 quickly, violently, and relentlessly to death. He or she died, 

 not from the remote effects of alcohol, but from poison actually 

 circulating in the blood at the time of death, or during the few days 

 or weeks preceding. De mortuis nil nisi bonum ; but I could not 

 truthfully enter anything else. Sometimes such a one, after a more 

 or less prolonged career of drink and poverty, owed his actual 

 decease to a windfall of money. More common is ' cirrhosis of the 

 liver,' an expression which is usually, but, as Dr H. B. Donkin has 

 shown, not always a synonym for chronic or soaker's alcoholism. 

 The Registrar-General's returns indicate that 4008 persons died of 

 this complaint in 1905, a number which works out at a rate of 

 117 per million living. This number, even when added to that 

 due to acute alcoholism, is too small to indicate stringent selection. 



492. But, looking through my counterfoils, I see recorded the 

 names of many people some of whom as I knew, and more of whom 

 as I suspected, had been injured by excessive drinking before they 

 died of accident or contracted phthisis, pneumonia, bronchitis, 

 apoplexy, or the more gradual forms of paralysis, erysipelas, 

 syphilis, kidney, heart, or arterial disease, or this or that other 

 complaint which was the immediate cause of death. The circum- 

 stances surrounding their ends make me very sure that in a large 

 proportion of cases they would not have contracted the fatal 

 disease, or would have recovered from it had they not previously 

 weakened their powers of resistance by intemperance. Some years 

 ago " The Harveian Society of London instituted an investigation 

 and found that in London, of 10,000 persons dying over twenty- 

 four years of age, the result was as follows : 



A. Deaths in nowise due to alcohol 8598 



B. Deaths accelerated or partly caused by its abuse . 1005 



C. Deaths wholly due to it 397 



. . . These 1402 deaths constituted almost exactly 14 per cent, 

 of the total deaths. If this proportion still continues . . . the 

 total deaths in the United Kingdom for 1889, altogether or partly 

 caused by alcohol were 94,416, of which 26,736 would be directly 

 due to alcohol and 67,680 accelerated or partly caused by it. 



