BY FELIX L. OSWALD, M.D.

CHAPTER I.—THE SECRET OF THE ALCOHOL HABIT.

“Consistency is the Test of Truth.”—Wilberforce.

Among the strange legends of the Middle Ages there are certain traditions which have evidently a figurative significance, and whose origin has often been traced to the allegorical mythology of an earlier age. An allegory of that sort is the legend of the “Marvel of Nikolsburg,” near Vienna; a miraculous image that appeared always an inch higher than the person standing before it. “It overtopped a giant, and all but condescended to the stature of a dwarf,” says the tradition.

That image is a symbol of nature. The lowest savage must dimly recognize the fact that man can not measure his cunning against the wisdom of the Creator, and the highest development of science has only revealed its own incompetence to imitate, or even comprehend, the structural perfection of the simplest living organism. The Author of life deals only in masterpieces; the marvelous fitness of his contrivances is as infinite in his smallest as in his greatest works, and the apparent exceptions from that rule can nearly all be traced to the influence of abnormal circumstances. Our own interference with the order of nature has caused the discords in the harmony of creation which furnish the chief arguments of pessimism. The winter torrents which devastate the valleys of southern France with a fury which Condorcet calls the “truculence of a vainly worshiped heaven,” flowed in harmless brooks till the hand of man destroyed the protecting forests that absorbed and equalized the drainage of the Alpine slopes, the same imprudence has turned the gardens of the East into deserts and obstructed with sandbars the channels of once navigable rivers. The wanton extermination of woodbirds has revenged itself by insect plagues. Consumption, that cruel scourge of the human race, is the direct consequence of the folly which makes us prefer the miasma of our tenement-prisons to the balm of God’s free air. We are too apt to confound the results of our sins against nature with the original arrangements of Providence. But the strangest instance of that mistake is the fallacy which has long biased our dealings with the curse of the alcohol habit. Drunkards plead their inability to resist the promptings of an imperious appetite. Their friends lament the antagonism of nature and duty, the weakness of the flesh frustrating the resolves of a willing spirit. Even temperance orators dwell on the dangers of “worldly temptations,” of “selfish, sensual indulgences,” as if the alcohol habit were the result of an innate propensity—deplorable in its collateral consequences, but withal entitled to the compromising concessions which ascetic virtue owes to the cravings of an impetuous natural instinct. In other words, we palliate a flagrant crime against the physical laws of God, as if nature herself had lured us to our ruin; the votaries of alcohol plead their ignorance, as if the Providence that warns us against the sting of a tiny insect and teaches the eye to protect itself against a mote of dust, had provided no adequate safeguards against the greatest danger to health and happiness.

And yet those safeguards would abundantly answer their protective purpose if persistent vice had not almost deadened the faculty of understanding the monitions of our physical conscience. It is true that the stimulant-thirst of the confirmed drunkard far exceeds the urgency of the most impetuous instincts, but by that very excessiveness and persistence the far-gone development of the alcohol habit proves what the mode of its incipience establishes beyond the possibility of a doubt, namely, the radical difference of its characteristics from those of a natural appetite. For,

1. Under Normal Circumstances the Attractiveness of Alimentary Substances is Proportioned to the degree of their Healthfulness and their Nutritive Value.—To the children of nature all hurtful things are repulsive, all beneficial things attractive. Providence has endowed our species with a liberal share of the protective instinct that teaches our dumb fellow-creatures to select their proper food, and even in this age of far-gone degeneration the dietetic predilections of children and primitive men might furnish the criteria of a general food reform. No creature is misled by an innate craving for unwholesome food, nor by an instinctive aversion to wholesome substances. Our natural repugnance to nearly all kinds of “medicines,” i. e., virulent stimulants, has already begun to be recognized as a suggestive illustration of that rule. A child’s hankering after sweetmeats is only an apparent exception, for, as Dr. Schrodt observes, the conventional diet of our children is so deficient in saccharine elements that instinct constantly strives to supply an unsatisfied want. Human beings fed chiefly on fruit syrups would instinctively hanker after farinaceous substances. The savages of our northwestern prairies are as fond of honey as their grizzly neighbors. Nurslings, deprived of their mothers’ milk, instinctively appreciate the proper component parts of artificial surrogates. Sailors in the tropics thirst after fruit, after refrigerating fluids, after fresh vegetables. In the arctic seas they crave calorific food—oil or fat.

But in no climate of this earth is man afflicted with an instinctive hankering after alcohol. To the palate of an unseduced boy rum is as repulsive as corrosive sublimate. I do not speak only of the sons of nature-abiding parents, but of the children of vice, left to the guidance of their enfeebled, but not intentionally perverted, instincts. The intuitive bias even of such is in the direction of total abstinence from all noxious stimulants, for nature has willed that all her creatures should begin the pilgrimage of life from beyond the point where the roads of purity and vice diverge. In their projects for the abolition of the stimulant habit, temperance people are, indeed, rather inclined to underrate the difficulties of a total cure of a confirmed poison vice, but equally apt to overrate the difficulty of total prevention. The supposed effects of an innate predisposition can generally be traced to the direct influence of a vicious education. Jean Jacques Rousseau expressed his conviction that a fondness for intoxicating liquors is nearly always contracted in the years of immaturity, when the deference to social precedents is apt to overcome the warnings of instinct, but that those who have escaped or not yielded to the temptations of that period would ever afterward be safe. Dr. Zimmerman, too, admits that “home influences are too often mistaken for hereditary influences.” And boy topers are not always voluntary converts. The year before I left my native town (Brussels), I found a drunken lad on the platform of the railway depot and carried him to the house of a medical friend, who put him to bed and turned him over to a policeman the next morning. The little fellow was recognized as an old offender, but when the court was going to send him to a house of correction my friend offered to take him back, and, on condition of keeping him away from his parents, was permitted to take care of him, and finally made him his office-boy. His parents were ascertained to be both habitual drunkards, but their son (Æt. 11), showed no inclination to follow their example, and voluntarily abstained from the light wines which now and then made their appearance on the doctor’s table—though he never missed an opportunity to rejoin his old playmates, and, as his patron expressed it, “was a dangerous deal too smart to be entrusted with the collection of bills.” Six months after his last scrape I found him alone in the doctor’s office, where he had collected a private library of picture papers and illustrated almanacs. “What made you get so drunk last Easter?” I asked him, “are you so fond of brandy?”

“Nenni, mais Pa m’en fit prendre,” he replied—“father made me drink it.”

2. The Instinctive Aversion to any Kind of Poison can be Perverted into an Unnatural Craving after the same Substance.—Poisons are either repulsive or insipid. Arsenic, sugar of lead, and antimony, belong to the latter class. To the first-born children of earth certain mineral poisons were decidedly out of the way substances, against which nature apparently thought it less necessary to provide special safeguards. But, though less repulsive than other poisons, such substances are never positively attractive, and often (like verdigris, potassium, etc.), perceptibly nauseous. Vegetable poisons are either nauseous or intensely bitter. Hasheesh is more unattractive than turpentine. Opium is acrid caustic. Absinthe (wormwood extract) is as bitter as gall. Instinct resists the incipience of an insidious second nature.

But that instinct is plastic. If the warnings of our physical conscience remain unheeded, if the offensive substance is again and again forced upon the unwilling stomach, nature at last chooses the alternative of compromising the evil, and, true to her supreme law, of preserving existence at any cost, prolongs even a wretched life by adapting the organism to the exigencies of an abnormal habit. She still continues her protest in the feeling of exhaustion which follows every poison-debauch, but permits each following dose of the insidious drug to act as a temporary re-invigorant, or at least as a spur to the functional activity of the exhausted organism, for the apparent return of vital vigor is, in fact, nothing but a symptom of the morbid energy exerted by the system in its efforts to rid itself of a deadly intruder, for each new application of the stimulus is as regularly followed by a distressing reaction. And only then the slave of the unnatural habit becomes conscious of that peculiar craving which is entirely distinct from the promptings of a healthy appetite—a craving uncompromisingly directed toward a special—once repulsive—substance, a craving defying the limiting instincts which indicate the proper quantum of wholesome foods and drinks, a craving which each gratification makes more irresistible, though for the time being each indulgence is followed by a depressing reaction. The appetite for wholesome substances—however palatable—is never exclusive. A child may become passionately fond of ice cream, yet accept cold water and fruit cake as a welcome substitute. A predilection for honey, strawberries, or sweet tree fruits will not tempt the admirers of such dainties to commit forgery and highway robbery to indulge their penchant—as long as their kitchen affords a supply of savory vegetables. Unnatural appetites have no natural limits; but the art of the best pastry cook would hardly induce his customers to stupefy and bestialize themselves with his compounds. There are no milk topers, no suicidal potato eaters, no victims of a chronic porridge passion. In spite of occasional surfeits the craving for alimentary substances increases and decreases with the needs of the organism, while that of the poison drinker yields only to the temporary extinction of consciousness.

In a state of nature every normal function is associated with a pleasurable sensation, and instead of resulting in agonizing reactions a feast of wholesome food is followed by a state of considerable physical comfort—“the beatific consciousness of perfect digestion,” as Baron Brisse describes the pleasures of the after dinner hour. But no length of practice will ever save the poison slave from the penalties of his sins against nature. Each full indulgence is followed by a full measure of woful retributions, while a half indulgence results in a half depression to the verge of world-weary despondency, or fails to satisfy the lingering thirst after a larger dose of the same stimulant. And every poison known to modern chemistry can beget that specific craving. “Entirely accidental circumstances, the accessibility of special drugs, imitativeness and the intercourse of commercial nations, the mere whims of fashion, the authority of medical recommendations, have often decided the first choice of a special stimulant, destined to become a national beverage” and a national curse. The contemporaries of the Veda writers fuddled with soma-wine, the juice of a narcotic plant of the Himalaya foothills. Their neighbors, the pastoral Tartars, get drunk on Koumiss, or fermented mare’s milk, an abomination which in Eastern Europe threatens to increase the list of imported poisons, while opium is gaining ground in our Pacific States as fast as lager beer, chloral and patent “bitters” on the Atlantic slope. The French have added absinthe to their wines and liquors, the Turks hasheesh and opiates to strong coffee. North America has adopted tea from China, coffee from Arabia (or originally from Ceylon), tobacco from the Caribbean savages, highwines from France and Spain, and may possibly learn to drink Mexican aloe-sap, or chew the coca leaves of the South American Indians. Arsenic has its votaries in the southern Alps. Cinnebar and acetate of copper victimize the miners of the Peruvian Sierras. The Ashantees are so fond of sorghum beer that their chieftains have to keep special bamboo cages for the benefit of quarrelsome drunkards. The pastor of a Swiss colony in the Mexican State of Oaxaca told me that the mountaineers of that neighborhood befuddle themselves with cicuta syrup, the inspissated juice of a kind of hemlock that first excites and then depresses the cerebral functions, excessive garrulity being the principal symptom of the exalted stage of intoxication. A decoction of the common fly toadstool (agaricus maculatus) inflames the passions of the Kamschatka natives, makes them pugnacious, disputative, but eventually splenetic (Chamisso’s “Reisen,” p. 322). The Abyssinians use a preparation of dhurra-corn that causes more quarrels than gambling. It is a favorite beverage at festivals, and is vaunted as a remedy for various complaints, though Belzoni mentions that it makes its votaries more subject to the attacks of the Nile fever. According to Professor Vamberg, the Syrian Druses pray, though apparently in vain, to be delivered from the temptation of foxglove tea. Comparative pathology has multiplied these analogies till, in spite of the arguments of a thousand specious advocates, there is no valid reason to doubt that the alleged innate craving for the stimulus of fermented or distilled beverages is wholly abnormal, and that the alcohol habit is characterized by all the peculiarities of a poison vice.

3. All Poison Habits are Progressive.—There is a deep significance in that term of our language which describes an unnatural habit as growing upon its devotees, for we find, indeed, a striking analogy between the development of the stimulant habit and that of a parasitical plant, which, sprouting from tiny seeds, fastens upon, preys upon, and at last strangles its victims. The seductiveness of every stimulant habit gains strength with each new indulgence, and it is a curious fact that that power is proportioned to the original repulsiveness of the poison. The tonic influence of Chinese tea is due to the presence of a stimulating ingredient known as theÏne, in its concentrated form a strong narcotic poison, but forming only a minute percentage of the component parts of common green tea. On the Pacific coast of our country thousands of Chinese immigrants carry their thrift to the degree of renouncing their favorite beverage, but neither considerations of economy nor of self-preservation will induce the same exiles to break the fetters of the opium habit. Not one hasheesh-eater in a hundred can hope to emancipate himself from the thraldom of his vice. The guests of King Alcohol, too, would make their reckoning without their host in hoping to take in the fun of intoxication as a votary of pleasure would engage in a transient pastime: his palace is an Armida castle, that rarely dismisses a visitor.

“In describing the effects of the alcohol habit,” says Dr. Isaac Jennings, “I want to impress the reader with another feature of it—its perpetuity. It can never be put off during the lifetime of the individual; it may be covered up to appearance, but it can not be effaced.… It seems to be a common impression that alcohol circulates through the body, excites the action of the heart and liver, quickens and enlivens the animal spirits, and then passes off, and leaves no trace of its visitation, or at most only a temporary loss of power, which is soon restored by a self-moved power pump. This is a great and fundamental error. Every drop of alcohol that enters the stomach inflicts an injury that will continue as long as the old stock lasts, and reach even to the young sprouts. It may not be enstamped on them in precisely the same way, but it will affect essentially the same parts.” (“Medical Reform,” pp. 173-175.)

“If a man was sent to hell,” says Dr. Rush, “and kept there for a thousand years as a punishment for drinking, and then returned, his first cry would be, ‘Give me rum, give me rum!’”

“The infernal powers blindfold the victims of their altars,” says Lessing, and the stimulant vice seems, in fact, to weaken not only the physical constitution of its votaries, but their moral power of resistance, and often even the faculty of realizing the perils of their practice, as if the poison had struck its roots into the very souls of its victims.

But the alcohol habit grows outward, as well as inward. We have seen that each gratification of the poison vice is followed by a depressing reaction. But his feeling of exhaustion is steadily progressive, and the correspondingly increased craving for a repetition of the stimulant dose forces its victim either to increase the quantity of the wonted tonic, or else to resort to a stronger poison. The experience of individual drunkards probably corresponds to the international development of the alcohol habit. Its first devotees contented themselves with moderate quantities of the milder stimulants: must, hydromel and light beer. But such tonics soon began to pall, and the jaded appetite of the toper soon resorted to strong wines, to hard cider, and finally to brandy and rum. Others increased the quantity, and learned to drink horse-pails full of beer, in which “diluted and harmless form” many German students manage to absorb a quart of alcohol per day.

“People sometimes wonder,” says Dr. Jennings, “why such and such men, possessing great intellectual power and firmness of character in other respects, can not drink moderately and not give themselves up to drunkenness. They become drunkards by law—fixed, immutable law. Let a man with a constitution as perfect as Adam’s undertake to drink alcohol, moderately and perseveringly, with all the caution and deliberate determination that he can command, and if he could live long enough he would just as certainly become a drunkard—get to a point where he could not refrain from drinking to excess—as he would go over Niagara Falls when placed in a canoe in the river above the falls and left to the natural operation of the current. And proportionally as he descended the stream would his alcoholic attraction for it increase, so that he would find it more and more difficult to get ashore, until he reached a point where escape was impossible.” (“Medical Reform,” p. 176.)

Now and then the votaries of the stimulant habit exchange their tonic for a stronger poison. Claude Bernard, the famous French pathologist, noticed that the opium vice recruits its female victims chiefly from the ranks of the veteran coffee drinkers. In Turkey, too, strong coffee has prepared the way for tobacco and opium; in Switzerland arsenic eaters have exchanged their kirschwasser for a more potent tonic; many French and Russian hard drinkers have learned to prefer ether to brandy.

But no poison vice can be cured by milder stimulants. The Beelzebub of alcohol does not yield to weaker spirits; hence the fallacy of the antidote plan. Nothing was formerly more common with temperance people of the compromise school than to comfort converted drunkards with stimulating drugs and strong coffee, in the hope that the organism might somehow be induced to acquiesce in the quid pro quo. That hope is a delusion. The surrogate may bring a temporary relief, but it can not satisfy the thirst for the stronger tonic, and only serves to perpetuate the stimulant diathesis—the poison hunger which will sooner or later revert to the wonted object of its passion. Unswerving loyalty to the pledge of the total abstinence plan is not at first the easiest, but eventually the surest way. For even after weeks of successful resistance to the importunities of the tempter, a mere spark may rekindle the smothered flames. “What takes place in the stomach of a reformed drunkard?” says Dr. Sewall—“the individual who abandons the use of all intoxicating drinks? The stomach by that extraordinary self-restorative power of nature gradually resumes its natural appearance. Its engorged blood-vessels become reduced to their original size, and a few weeks or months will accomplish this renovation, after which the individual has no longer any suffering or desire for alcohol. It is nevertheless true, and should ever be borne in mind, that such is the sensibility of the stomach of the reformed drunkard that a repetition of the use of alcohol, in the slightest degree, and in any form, under any circumstances, revives the appetite; the blood vessels again become dilated, and the morbid sensibility of the organ is reproduced.”

The use of any stimulating drug may rewaken the dormant propensity, and it will not change the result if the stimulant has been administered in the form of a medical prescription. Strong drink is a mocker, in disease as well as in health, and the road to the rum shop leads through the dispensary as often as through the beer garden.

The logical conclusion of all these premises thus reveals the two-fold secret of the alcohol habit: the anomaly of its attractiveness and the necessity of its progressiveness, and we at last recognize the truth that the road to intemperance is paved with mild stimulants, and that the only safe, consistent and effective plan of reform is total abstinence from all stimulating poisons.