Obrázky stránek
PDF
ePub

duty which the state owes to the inebriate and to society in this respect.

DISCUSSION

DR. MARY McCoy (Duluth) This is a question that touches the female portion of the community as much as it does the male. It has always seemed to me that when a hospital for the cure of the inebriate was advocated we were commencing at the wrong end of the question. The story has been told so often it has become hackneyed to you. What is the use of making indigent people drunkards, and then taxing the state? Why not do away with the cause of drunkenness? Why is it necessary to make ourselves a paternal institution? Why should we take care of the drunkard more than any other form of gluttony? Why not include the overeaters as well as the overdrinkers? Why not those who overdress as well as those who overdrink? Why not for the petty sins of mankind and womankind as well as gluttony?

Dr. C. A. KELSEY (Minneapolis): I feel like apologizing for taking up so much time of the Association, but I regret to see no discussion on this subject. While the remarks of the last speaker were very forcible, there are many unfortunate conditions of society that seem to be yet unsolved. The habit of one who is addicted to drinking tea, which is as injurious as tobacco to the system, is a habit we cannot reach, and while overeating and overdressing are extremes we are not yet able to reach, still we should not lose sight of the importance of the subject so ably presented and discussed in the doctor's paper. According to the remarks of the last speaker, a subject which touches home, which touches the wife and the mother, a subject which seems to me is clearly beyond the evils of drinking tea and coffee and overeating, it is hardly right or fair, should be put in the same class. I say this, being as strongly opposed to the use of liquor and the evils of it as any person in this assembly. We cannot revolutionize the world in one step, and if we devote ourselves to an attempt to prevent the harm of drinking tea and strong coffee and the use of tobacco, and class that with our attempts to overcome the evil effects and license of strong drink, we spread ourselves out so thin that our influence is absolutely lost. The question of how best to manage the liquor problem is hardly the subject to be discussed here. I believe, however, the doctor in his paper has touched a vital point, because he has touched a point that has to do with posterity, with children yet unborn, and while I am a strong prohibitionist, I believe the greatest work in the line of temperance is with the boys and girls, and going one step further back and trying to remove the evil results from them in preventing the inebriate from running at large to do harm to the coming generation as well as to himself in the present.

I think it is a subject well worthy our consideration, a subject that ought not to be left without our careful thought and consideration. (Applause.)

DR. C. H. HUNTER (Minneapolis): I have about come to the conclusion that if a person is given to drink he should be advised to take the Keeley cure. It is possible that these establishments will not take the place of the hospital, and that a state hospital is necessary. But if the state will not take care of the matter we should look to those institutions for help. They are usually in the hands of medical men, and although they are not all men in whom we put the utmost confidence, still I do not know that they are prone to worse evils than the ordinary medical practitioner. We are certainly at a great disadvantage in any attempt to cure these people, or to do anything with them in our capacity as private practitioners. I can recall only a few people in my practice whom I have been able, by medication of one kind or another or by other influences, to cure of the drink habit. People begin in a social way and gradually increase the habit, and then they go on sprees once in a while, and by the time they reach middle life they have got to be taken care of either by some individual institution or by the state. I myself assisted and encouraged and sent a number to Rochester, and I was very much disappointed when that department of the state hospital was discontinued. I have never been able to learn why it was not continued. I presume it was, as the doctor suggests, from the opprobrium from being in an insane asylum. I think some influence should be exerted and some interest taken by some one to have a substitute provided for the insane hospital in those cases. A move of that sort, it seems to me, would be well worth the time and attention of some medical man who was in a position to do so. I think we all feel a helplessness in the presence of those cases. Some of them are extremely trying, and really we cannot consider them. If Dr. Dunning has any special information I am sure we would all be obliged to him to get the history of that movement at Rochester, and the full reason why it was discontinued, and why there was no substitute provided.

DR. L. F. FOOTE (Minneapolis): I know nothing about the Rochester experiment, but I do know something about the Illinois reason for refusing an inebriate an asylum in a state institution. There we formerly admitted only the criminal insane to our hospitals, and people who were sick, and whose friends were sick and had been committed to our state hospitals for the insane, objected to the criminal insane associating with friends who were not insane. The inebriate is purely and simply an inebriate. His is not a case of alcoholic insanity. You must draw a line between a case of alcoholic insanity and a case of inebriation, and it is necessarily a very

fine line to be drawn to know just who should be, and who should not be, admitted to the state hospital. I have long felt that the man who had an irresistible impulse to drink had a proper asylum in our state institution. I believe that is the view taken by most of the medical practitioners in this state, and it is in Illinois. I do not believe an inebriate has a place in that asylum. I do not believe he should be under the protection of the state, and maintained at the expense of the state. He drinks because he wants to. One of the speakers spoke about removing the producing causes, which was very good, but there is a line which should be drawn between that opinion and the opinion of the writer of the paper. I have long believed that the drunkard who drank whisky because he wanted to drink whisky, who wanted to drink because he wanted to go home and abuse his wife and baby, had only one legitimate place, and one only, and that is the stone pile. I believe if the law were enforced in this city and in every town in this state there would be less of this drinking going on. I think there would be fewer drunkards and drunkards' children. And therein lies the great danger to the future generation in making it weak and degenerate, and the children who are weak physically and mentally are sent to the asylum for us to take care of. If we will make an effort to enforce the laws we have to-day on our statute books we can do a great deal to stop this, and we will not have to establish hospitals to care for the common drunkards. (Applause.)

DR. A. W. DUNNING (Essayist): Perhaps I ought to say in answering the discussion that my own belief in regard to inebriety is that it is a disease, and I think the last speaker agrees with me in this respect. He says a drunkard transmits to his offspring a weakened tissue and such a constitution is more prone to disease. I think we agree on that point. It is a diseased condition to that extent, at least, that it exerts an hereditary influence upon following generations. My plea was that a hospital should be established at state expense for the care of the indigent inebriate, and I maintain that this is a business-like proposition, for the reasons mentioned in my paper. If these cases are taken early enough there is a distinct advantage to be gained by control. If they are taken as soon as they become addicted to the use of alcohol, before they have lost control of themselves, that is the time when treatment should begin, and that is the class to be cared for. I do not believe, with the last speaker, that "inebriety is always insanity," and that those cases have a place in the state hospital for the insane. The inebriate has no place in the hospital for the insane. He is a type and a class entirely apart from the insane, and should be cared for in an institution by himself, and on radically different lines. In answer to Dr. Hunter, I do not know that I can analyze the occurrence of a few years ago when a state law abolished the

inebriate department at Rochester. I believe it is as one of the speakers has stated, too many of our common drunkards were sent to the hospital to winter. The fundamental idea of that was wrong. They were not taken early enough. The institution was not specially prepared for them, and the conditions were not such as would apply to an institution especially for inebriates. There was another factor, a purely political one. The state officials became anxious to cut down expense, and a cry arose from all over the state that these common drunkards were allowed to go there and be maintained at the expense of the state when they should be pounding stone. I do not approve that idea, for I believe the inebriate is a sick man and should be treated as such. I do believe in private institutions such as Dr. Hunter suggests for those who are able to pay for their care, but even this is impossible until we have a law to get hold of and to control the inebriate. Until we have such a law that will restrain the individual liberty we cannot compel them to go to a state hospital or any other institution. In answer to Dr. McCoy, society will have to undergo radical reconstruction before we can arrive at the ideal condition she describes. Theoretically she may be right, but practically I am sure her plan would not meet with success under existing social conditions.

THE DEMOCRACY OF EDUCATION IN MEDICINE: A PLEA FOR BROADENED POLICIES

GEORGE C. WELLNER, M. D.

Red Wing

There is found running through the more recent, if not the earlier, addresses of the presidents of the American Medical Association, along with a tone commendatory of work accomplished, a tone of another kind, a tone which deplores that the Association "has not won the influential position to which it should aspire, that it has been a struggle on our part to protect the public from a horde of uneducated and misguided persons, who under the guise of Christian Science, osteopathy and other schisms, insist on being permitted to take charge of human beings suffering from disease;" that our progress in securing medical legislation has been snail-like, and there are still other conditions these addresses deplore, all of like tenor. They briefly summarize the aims and needs of the profession, and their burden is the plea for its higher education and its better organization.

"It is," says a distinguished president of the Association, “a fact painful to acknowledge, that of the three so-called learned professions, the ministry, law, and medicine, ours is assigned the inferior position, and we who, day in and out, in every home in the land, are close to the personal friendship of our patients, respected and loved as individuals, are incapable of wielding by organization and discipline the powerful influence of a united profession aiming at a high and honorable purpose."

The import of these addresses is that the profession is incompetent for public influence. That there is a large basis of truth in this indictment goes without question,

« PředchozíPokračovat »