70 A STUDY IN HEREDITY 



place the annual death-rate as low as 52,640, others 

 as high as 120,000. But into all these medical 

 estimates there enters one great source of error. 

 They are founded on returns furnished by prac- 

 tising doctors. But if a medical man does not 

 Jknow that a death has been accelerated by alcohol, 

 he must place it in the opposite category ; and 

 very frequently, when a death has been so 

 accelerated, he cannot know. For instance, a 

 man may perish of some illness or accident from 

 which he would have recovered had he not been 

 weakened by previous intemperance. His doctor, 

 seeing him perhaps for the first time in his last 

 illness, would scarcely attribute the fatal result of, 

 say, consumption, or a broken leg to inebriety, 

 which may have occurred many years previously, 

 and which is not mentioned nor even thought of 

 by the patient or his friends. To take a striking 

 example, it has been found that the wounds of 

 non-drinkers heal better and more quickly than 

 those of drinkers. Thus surgeons accustomed to 

 European wars are often astonished at the 

 wonderful recoveries made by Arabs, Turks, 

 Afridis, and other non-drinkers. Now who can 

 say what proportion of all the thousands that have 

 perished on both sides in the Boer war would 

 have survived had they never touched alcohol ? 

 What surgeon, seeing a previously unknown 



