Alcohol and Science, or Alcohol; What It Is, and What It Does

This historic book may have numerous typos or missing text. Not indexed. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1886. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... an Irish woman. The friends resolved on 'waking' the corpse. The body was laid on a board, and in the apartment scores of persons (men, women and children) ate, drank, and slept, the orgies being kept amid drunken and profane revelry during day and night The whole place reeked with loathsome and disgusting emanations of drunken and unwashed bacchanals. Drunken women squatted thickly on the flags of the court before the open doors of the crowded room, where the corpse lay. The husband of the woman, before a week was past, was among the dead; and before the end of July, forty-eight persons died from cholera within a radius of a hundred and fifty yards from the court which had been the scene of the ill-timed revelry. TOTAL ABSTINENCE PREVENTS CHOLERA 623. We have seen that alcoholics are conductors of cholera. Let us now see the effects of total abstinence. From the statistics of cholera we find that in Albany, in 1832, the fatal cases of cholera in persons over 16 years of age, were as follows: Intemperate 140, free drinkers 55, moderate drinkers 31, strictly temperate 5, members of temperance societies 2, idiot 1, unknown 2, total 333; population, 26,000; members of temperance societies, 5,000. '624. Thus while only one out of every 2500 members of temperance societies died of cholera in Albany; of those not members of such societies, one died for every sixty of the whole population. The premonitory symptoms of 282 of those who died were diarrhea; the remaining 51 unknown. Of the 5 strictly temperate, one, previous to the attack, ate stale and sour preserves; the second, after recovering from an attack, went out and got wet and had a relapse; the third eat two pineapples, which produced the attack; the fourth neglected a diarrhea; in the fifth, the cause is...