ledge of
any agent equally pleasing to the palate, and yet so destructive
of life."

Dr. Norman Kerr, President of the Society for the Study of Inebriety,
England, says:--

"My own experience of thirty-four years in the practice of my
profession has taught me that in nearly all cases and kinds of
disease the medical use of alcohol is unnecessary, and in a
large number of instances is prejudicial and even dangerous.
Having given an intoxicant, in strictly definite and guarded
doses, probably on the whole only about once in 3,000 cases
(then usually when nothing else was available in an emergency),
and having had most varieties of disease to contend with, my
death-rate and duration of illness have been quite as low as my
neighbors. The experience of the London Temperance Hospital and
other similar institutions, the current reports of that hospital
being now reliable scientific records, amply support this
experience.

"The chief peril of narcotic drugs has always appeared to me to
lie in their disguising the real state of the patient from
himself as well as from his doctor and his friends. If there is
any serious ailment, such as cholera or fever, the sufferer may
seem to be and may feel better. He is not better. He is actually
worse--made worse by the alcohol, and not unseldom, after the
evanescent alcoholic disguise and deceptive improvement has
faded, it is found that the malady itself has been progressing,
unseen and unsuspected from the delusive aspect of the alcohol,
steadily toward a fatal termination, which might, in many cases,
have been averted but for the true state of the patient having
been completely masked.

"Wherever the blame really has lain, one thing is now clear,
that alcoholic intoxicants are very rarely useful as a medicine;
are at the best dangerous remedies; and that, other things being
equal, the less they are resorted to the better for the chances
of the patient's recovery, the better for body and brain, the
better for physical, intellectual and moral well-being. Alcohol
does not nourish, but pulls down; does not stimulate, but
depresses; does not strengthen, but excites and exhausts.
Alcohol is the pathological fraud of frauds, degenerating while
it claims to be reconstructing, enfeebling while it appears to
be invigorating, destroying vita