Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why

“The effect of continually dosing with this drug is too apparent wherever it is used, benumbing the senses, and rendering more difficult every natural function. Alcohol never sustains the powers of life. It sometimes changes the symptoms of disease, but at the expense of the vitality of the body. What is called its supporting action, is a fever induced by the poison, which finally prostrates the patient. The secret of its action is found in the laws of vitality. The man who takes alcohol to help digest his food, must first throw off the alcohol, before his stomach can act healthfully.

“There is one encouraging fact to be noted in this connection, that the use of alcohol in medicine has very much diminished during the past twenty-five years, and the present tendency is constantly in that direction. Right here is an important point which I wish to make: When the physician ceases to prescribe alcohol as a medicine, the drink problem will have reached the final stage of its solution. Mankind will eventually learn that safety lies not so much in skillful doctors, or in some wonderful ‘new remedy,’ as in daily obedience to the laws of health. A small amount of prevention is of more worth than all the power of cure.” – Dr. C. H. Shepard, Brooklyn, N. Y.

“My observation has been that there is a decided tendency among educated physicians to give less alcohol than formerly in the treatment of disease. Of late years I have given but very little alcohol in my own practice. The tendency is due, in my opinion, to the study of the physiological action of drugs, and to the better understanding of the causation of disease and pathological processes. Modern investigators now know that we have therapeutic agents that meet the requirements of disease processes with more scientific accuracy than is obtained by the exhibition of alcohol.” – Dr. Donnelly, Secretary of Minnesota State Medical Society, St. Paul, Minn.

“Dr. Pearce Gould recently made a speech to the National Temperance League on alcohol and the advantage of doing without it, both in health and in the treatment of disease. It takes a strong man to say the strong things which Mr. Gould said on the subject, especially if he happens to be a medical man. No doubt, as Dr. Gould says, the use of alcohol in medical practice is nothing now compared to what it was twenty years ago, much more forty years ago, when Dr. Todd’s influence, and the reaction from the so-called antiphlogistic treatment were at their height. Public opinion has been enlightened by the evidence of leaders in medicine, such as Dr. Parkes, Sir William Gull, Dr. Gairdner, Dr. Sanderson, and others, and medical men have dared to treat disease without alcohol, or with only small quantities of it. There are physicians and surgeons of reputation and success, who are so strong in their convictions that alcohol is of little use in the treatment of disease, that it destroys tissues, lessens the resistance to microbes, deranges functions, spoils temper, and shortens life, that they are ready to testify to this effect in public, in company with redoubtable champions of the temperance cause like the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sir William White (chief constructor of the navy), and the Bishop of Derry, who have as much prejudice to contend against in their spheres as the medical man has in his. We recognize with pleasure the good done by such testimony as Dr. Gould’s. Men whose record and authority in the profession are such as his have the courage of their opinions, and their honest testimony will be respected even by those who do not go quite so far in discarding alcohol as an element of diet, or as a medicine.” —The Lancet, London, May 14, 1898.

“The light of exact investigation has shown that the therapeutic value of alcohol rests on an insecure basis, and it is constantly being made clearer that after all alcohol is a sort of poison to be handled with the same care and circumspection as other agents capable of producing noxious and deadly effect upon the organism. It has been shown by Abbott and others that alcoholic animals are more susceptible to infections than normal animals. And Laitinen, after having studied the influence of alcohol upon infections with anthrax, tubercle and diphtheria bacilli in dogs, rabbits, guinea-pigs and pigeons, reaches the same general results with certainty and directness. Under all circumstances alcohol causes a marked increase in susceptibility no matter whether given before or after infections, no matter whether the doses were few and massive or numerous and small, and no matter whether the infection was acute or chronic. The alcoholic animals either die while the controls remain alive, or in case both die, death is earlier in the alcoholic. The facts brought out by the researches of Abbott and Laitinen and others do not furnish the slightest support for the use of alcohol in the treatment of infectious diseases in man.” —Journal American Medical Association, Editorial, September 8, 1900.

“Step by step the progress of science has nullified every theory on which the physician administers alcohol. Every position taken has been disapproved. Alcohol is not a food and does not nourish, but impairs nutrition. It is not a stimulant in the proper acceptation of the term; on the contrary it is a depressant. Hence its former universal use in cases of shock was, to say the least, a grave mistake. It has been proved by recent experiments that alcohol retards, perverts, and is destructive either in large or small doses to normal cell growth and development.” – Nathan S. Davis, Sr., M.D., former Dean of Northwestern University Medical School, Chicago, Illinois. (Deceased.)

“It seems to me that the field of usefulness of alcohol in therapeutics is extremely limited and possibly does not exist at all. Probably every supposed indication for its use can be met better and more safely by other drugs. The recent work on the so-called food value of alcohol is the subject of much misunderstanding. While it is true that under some circumstances, for example, after a person has acquired a certain degree of tolerance to its poisonous effects, alcohol seems to act as a food in the sense that fats and carbohydrates do, I believe this to be at present a matter of little more than theoretical importance.” – Dr. Reid Hunt, Chief of the Department of Pharmacology, Public Health and Marine Hospital Service, Washington, D.C.

“The physician should have blazoned before him, ‘If you can do no good, do no harm.’ If this rule is adhered to, in ninety-nine cases out of one hundred the physician will give no alcohol. In the medical wards of the Pennsylvania Hospital I have found that in acute as well as chronic disease we can do without alcohol. It does harm rather than good. Alcohol masks the symptoms of disease, so that we cannot know the patient’s real condition.” – J. H. Musser, M. D., Philadelphia, Pa., Ex-President American Medical Association.

“It is time alcohol was banished from the medical armamentarium; whisky has killed thousands where it cured one.” – J. H. McCormack, M. D., Secretary Kentucky Board of Health, and Organizer for the American Medical Association.

“I very rarely use alcohol in my practice. I think that its use is never essential. Physicians are using it less and less in the treatment of disease owing to the recognition that it is a narcotic, not a stimulant, and that other narcotics are usually better when a narcotic is required.” – Richard C. Cabot, M. D., Professor of Clinical Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Mass.

“My position has been that alcohol should be prescribed with as much care as to indications and circumspection as to dose and method as in the use of any other drug that in health would prove harmful, as morphine, belladonna, aconite, quinine, etc. I believe strongly that in pneumonia, typhoid fever, and tuberculosis especially, the indiscriminate use of alcohol in the past has caused an incalculable amount of distress and needless disaster to suffering humanity.” – Howard S. Anders, M. D., Professor of Physical Diagnosis, Medico-Chirurgical College, Philadelphia, Pa.

“I do not think alcohol of any value in the treatment of disease; formerly it was used a great deal in the hospital wards, and ‘liquor slips’ were daily signed. Now, I never order liquor in any quantity, and at times for weeks I have not signed a single slip ordering liquor.” – Henry Jackson, M. D., Professor in Harvard Medical School.

“In the overwhelming majority of cases I am in entire sympathy with the movement to abolish the routine use of alcoholics from medicine, and I rarely advise such in my practice.” – Edward R. Baldwin, M. D., Saranac Lake Sanitarium, New York.

“I seldom prescribe alcohol.” – George Blumer, M. D., Yale Medical School, New Haven, Conn.

“Whereas, The study of alcohol from a scientific standpoint has demonstrated that its action is deceptive, and that it does not have the medical properties that we once claimed for it; now, therefore, be it

“Resolved, By the West Virginia State Medical Association, That we deplore the fact that our profession has been quoted so long as claiming for it virtues which it does not possess, and that we earnestly pledge ourselves to discourage the use of it, both in and out of the sick room.” —Resolution passed at annual meeting May, 1908.

“I have been actively engaged in the practice of medicine for nearly twenty-five years, in the early portion of which I prescribed alcoholics moderately but yet with considerable frequency. For the past ten years I have been finding professionally less place for alcoholics of any sort in my practise, and for perhaps three years I have scarcely ever prescribed them. I am satisfied that my cases of pneumonia and typhoid come through in better condition without anything alcoholic, even wines, and I no longer prescribe these at all in cases of tuberculosis. I have noted also that among my professional associates of the thinking rather than of the automatic type, the medicinal use of alcohol is rapidly lessening.” – C. G. Hickey, M. D., Lecturer on Medicine, Denver and Gross College of Medicine, Denver, Colorado.

“In the thirteen years I have taught in Michigan I have not used alcohol in the treatment of disease in a routine way. Even alcoholic preparations, such as tinctures, have been used in very rare instances. I have occasion to speak on this subject every year to about two hundred students. My reasons for taking this stand are chiefly medical, though I am heartily in sympathy with the ethical and moral phases of the temperance movement.” – Dr. George Dock, formerly Professor of Medicine, University of Michigan Medical College, now of Tulane University, New Orleans.

“Alcohol is distinctly a poison, and the limitation of its use should be as strict as that of any other kind of poison. It is not an appetizer, and even in small quantities it hinders digestion. The use of alcohol is emphatically diminishing in hospital practise.” – Sir Frederick Treves, Surgeon to King Edward.

“If during the last quarter of a century I have prescribed almost no alcohol in the treatment of disease, it is because I have found very little reason for its use, and it seemed to me that my patients got on better without it.” – Sir James Barr, Dean of the Medical School of Liverpool University.

“With the increase of medical knowledge and with the increase of medical observation, it is shown every year that the value of alcohol as a drug has been enormously overestimated. It is a very poor agent, and only in common use because it is so easily obtained. The medical profession is using it less and less, because they appreciate it now at its true value. Personally I never order it, because I believe patients recover better without it.” – Sir Victor Horsley, Surgeon to London Hospital.

“The same care and discrimination should be given to the prescribing of alcohol as to the most deadly drug with which we have to deal. In looking at the report of Radcliffe Infirmary for the past month I see that in dealing with twenty-five cases I ordered alcohol costing exactly 1¾ pence.” – Dr. William Collier, President British Medical Association, 1904.

“In England at present the use of large doses of alcohol seems to have greatly gone out of hospital practise, and opinion is certainly growing that not even small doses are required. Diseases of the stomach, liver, heart, and kidneys have appeared to me, in my practise, to be much more satisfactorily treated without beer, wines, or spirits.” – Dr. C. R. Drysdale, Consulting Physician to the Metropolitan Hospital, London.

“Alcohol is a functional and tissue poison, and there is no proper or necessary use for it as medicine.” – Dr. Frank Payne, Vice-President London Pathological Society.

“Of scarlet fever I have treated some 2,000 cases. I have never seen a case in which, in my opinion, alcohol was necessary; no case in which its administration was beneficial; but I have seen more than one case in which its action was directly injurious. * * * Alcohol in no case averts a fatal issue where such is impending. * * * The facts are dead against alcohol. In hospitals there has been an increase of 300 per cent. in the use of milk, and a decline of 47 per cent. in the use of alcohol. Progress in treatment of disease has gone hand in hand with disuse of alcohol. The use of alcohol formerly was the outcome of ignorance, a confession of weakness and defeat; to-day it is the expression of inability to discard the fetters of an outworn routine.” – Dr. C. Knox Bond, in Medical Times.

“For many years I have dispensed almost entirely with alcohol as an aid in surgical treatment. As a student I saw it used, almost as a matter of routine, for every kind of surgical malady except head injuries, and in my early years I naturally followed the practise of my teachers; but as soon as I made trial for myself of the effect of withholding alcohol, I found how entirely overrated its value was, and how gravely mistaken had been the teaching. It is commonly held, I believe, that alcoholic stimulants are of especial value in all forms of septic inflammation, such as erysipelas, pyæmia, septicæmia, and hectic fever. I believe that this belief is founded solely upon tradition unsupported by any trustworthy evidence, and untested by experiment or experience.” – Dr. A. Pearce Gould, F. R. C. S., Surgeon to the Middlesex Hospital, London.

“I have not prescribed alcohol to my patients for more than ten years, and can affirm positively that they have fared well under this change of treatment. Since I formerly followed the universal practice, I am competent to make comparisons, and these speak unconditionally in favor of treatment without alcohol. As a preventive of waste I use among fever patients nothing but real foods; in addition to milk, particularly sugar, which can be administered to any fever patient in ample quantity in the form of fruit juices, stewed fruit, sweet lemonade, fruit ices, sugared tea, etc., concerning which hundreds of investigations have demonstrated positively that it prevents the waste of both albumen and fat. As a stimulant I employ, besides hydriatic methods, which at the same time abstract heat, almost nothing but camphor, and I can affirm that it is unconditionally preferable to alcohol for its prompt results and the absence of disagreeable after-effects (intoxication, benumbing). Pneumonia, especially, subsides without alcohol to perfect satisfaction, and I rejoice to agree in this respect with Aufrecht, one of the best authorities on this disease, who in his monograph in Nothnagle’s manual, acknowledges himself hostile to the use of alcohol in the treatment of pneumonia, and hopes that its use may be speedily abolished. For the reasons previously specified, I should like to see that extended to all use of alcohol in therapeutics. However, that can come to pass only when all thinking physicians clearly appreciate the fact that no substance is able to undertake the double role of a food and a poison, and, also, that for alcohol no nutritive, but only toxic properties can be claimed.” – Max Kassowitz, M. D., Professor in the University of Vienna, Austria.

“Besides its deleterious influence on the nervous system and other important parts of our body, alcohol has a harmful action on the phagocytes, the agents of natural defense against infective microbes.” – Prof. Metchnikoff, Pasteur Institute, Paris, France.

“Alcoholic liquors are, to my mind, not only not valuable, but distinctly disadvantageous, in the treatment of disease, except in rare instances, as for example in the initial chill of some acute infectious disease. However, I have almost given up the use of alcohol in the treatment of disease.” – Dr. D. L. Edsall, Professor of Therapeutics in the University of Pennsylvania Medical School.

“As a rule which might well be regarded as universal in the practice of medicine, alcohol in the treatment of disease is an evil. In ordinary doses and in continuous use the sum of its reactions increases exhaustion, which may terminate fatally.” – Dr. John Van Duyn, Professor of Medicine in Syracuse, N. Y., University Medical School.

“In sixteen years of active practice I have not used alcoholics at all. I am medical director of the Scranton Sanitarium, and I have considerable trouble in trying to cure those who use alcohol, and to undo some of the work my fellow practitioners have unwittingly made.” – D. Webster Evans, M. D., Scranton, Pa.

“I am opposed to the use of alcoholic liquors as a beverage, and with rare exceptions, to their use in the treatment of diseases.” – Dr. Eugene Kerr, Physician to Phipps Dispensary, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, Md.

“In my professional work I do not advise or permit the use of alcohol as a beverage or medicine in any form whatever. No alcohol is used medicinally in my hospital wards. Beer or wine is not permitted to convalescents. Children are never given tinctures. Cases of delirium tremens receive no alcohol. The hypodermic use of alcohol is not permitted in cases of shock. There are other much more effective and less depressing diffusable stimulants.

“Among my colleagues the employment of alcohol as a medicine has diminished at least seventy-five per cent. in the past fifteen years.

“I have cast it out entirely.” – J. P. Warbasse, M. D., Chief Surgeon German Hospital, Brooklyn, N. Y.

“The habitual use of alcohol in any disease is worse than harmful.” – Robert B. Preble, M. D., Chicago, Ill.

“The last few years I find I have used less and less alcohol in prescribing for my patients until at the present time I use very little. I think my typhoid cases do better without alcohol than with it.” – H. H. Healy, M. D., former Sec’y North Dakota Board of Health.

“Alcohol is a poison. It is claimed by some that alcohol is a food. If so, it is a poisoned food.” – Frederick Peterson, M. D., Professor of Psychiatry, Columbia University, N. Y.

“Few physicians now credit alcohol as a food (that is, as a tissue builder) or as having any valuable medicinal qualities. In fact, it is considered by many to have a destructive rather than a constructive quality. I believe it should never be put into the human body.” – Eugene Hubbell, M. D., St. Paul, Minn.

“The medical profession is learning that alcohol has been much abused in the treatment of the sick, and is largely discarding it. I hardly find occasion to prescribe it once a year.” – W. A. Plecker, M. D., Sec’y State Board of Health, Hampton, Va.

“The use of alcohol as a beverage or therapeutically, is in either case a habit of the user. The stimulation is but temporary, the reaction leaving the nerve cells of the individual with less resisting power than before the ingestion of alcohol. * * * Never permit a verbal or written prescription of yours to give rise to the use of a habit forming drug.” —From a lecture to students in Omaha Medical College by J. M. Aiken, M. D., Clinical Instructor and Lecturer upon Nervous and Mental Diseases.

“The use of spirits as a stimulant in diseases, except in a very limited circle, is a mere empiricism for which no good reasons can be given. The teachings of medical men are no more to be followed blindly and without question. The tests of alcohol as a tonic, as a food, as a stimulant, as a retarder of waste, are all negative. There is no reliable evidence to support these claims, but a constant accumulation of facts to indicate the danger from the use of spirits. To give alcohol or any other drug without some rational theory in accord with the scientific researches of to-day is unpardonable.” – Dr. T. D. Crothers, Hartford, Conn., Editor of the Journal of Inebriety.

“Many physicians prescribe alcohol only because it is the desire of the patient, and because patients refuse medicine which the physicians would rather use.” – Everett Hooper, M. D. Boston, Mass.

“You are right in indicting alcohol for its insidious wrongs to humanity. It is an old and sly offender and very much the ‘mocker’ in medical practise that it has been pronounced in holy writ. It exhausts the latent energy of the organism often when that power is most needed to conserve the failing strength of the body in the battle with disease.” – Dr. C. H. Hughes, St. Louis, Missouri.

“The best class of thinkers, men of the best intellectual gauge, are those who are doing away with this miserable, unscientific practise of giving liquor.” – Dr. Boynton, Clifton Springs, N. Y.

“I believe that in the scientific light of the present era alcohol should be classed among the anæsthetics and poisons, and that the human family would be benefited by its entire exclusion from the field of remedial agents.” – Dr. J. S. Cain, Dean of the Faculty, Medical Department, University of the South, Sewanee, Tenn.

“Let me cite my experience in surgery for the last three years in proof of the uselessness of alcohol, and the benefit of abstinence from its administration. During that time I have performed more than one thousand operations, a large portion upon cases of railroad injuries, one hundred for appendicitis, and in none of these was alcohol administered in any form, either before, during, or after operations. I defy any one who still adheres to alcohol to show as good results. Equally gratifying results have been obtained with my medical cases, and I fail to understand how any observing and thinking physician can still cling to so prejudicial a drug as alcohol, when he has within his reach a multitude of valuable, exact, and reliable methods for combating, governing, and controlling disease.” – Dr. Evan C. Kane, Surgeon Pennsylvania Railroad, Kane, Pa.

“In my neurological practice I emphatically forbid my patients the use of alcohol. This poison has a special predilection for the nervous system which it influences sometimes to an alarming extent.” – Alfred Gordon, M. D., Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, Pa.

“Alcohol finds no place in my remedial list. It has been banished, not from sentiment, but from knowledge secured by scientific investigation.” – T. Alexander MacNicholl, M. D., New York City, one of the founders of the Red Cross Hospital, New York.

“No sound, scientific argument can be offered for the medical use of alcohol, either internally or externally. It is a toxic substance which ought to be retired from the materia medica, and placed in the catalog of obsolete drugs along with tobacco, lobelia, and like useless but highly toxic drug substances.” – Dr. J. H. Kellogg, Superintendent Battle Creek Sanitarium, Battle Creek, Michigan.

“The majority of medical men, without making any searching investigation into the abundant recent literature upon the subject of alcohol, are disposed to regard it with less and less favor as the years go by, while those who have closely followed the thorough investigations into the physiological action of alcohol recently made by scientists, have repudiated it altogether. * * * It is a lack of information upon this subject – together with the fact that alcohol has been used as a therapeutic agent for hundreds of years, during which it has formed the basis of all tonic or stimulating treatment – that gives alcohol its present hold upon a part of the medical profession.” – John Madden, M. D., Portland, Oregon, formerly professor in Milwaukee Medical College.

“Alcohol may fill an emergency when better means are not at hand, but, apart from this, I know of no use in the practise of medicine and surgery for which we have not better weapons at our command. There is but one reason for the continued use of alcohol – men use it because they love it.” Dr. W. F. Waugh, Chicago, Editor Journal of Clinical Medicine.