Religious and educational aspects of temperance / by various authors.

Date:
[1874?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Religious and educational aspects of temperance / by various authors. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    and rendered incapable of leaving a dying testimony to their anxious and expectant friends and relatives. I have heard this commented upon as a very just and serious complaint against some medical men. * Let me go home sober/ said an old lady, when urged on her death-bed to sustain her failing strength with brandy. The medical friend of the late excellent Dr. John Pye Smith, on perciving a rapid diminution of power, recommended some brandy to his water beverage. This proposal was conveyed to the eye of Dr. Smith in writing, on account of his great deafness. He turned to his wife, and emphatically said, ‘ Never, my dear; I charge you, if such a remedy be proposed when I am incompetent to refuse, let me die rather than swallow the liquid.’ ” A physician of great experience writes thus:— “ In my practice I have given no stimulants in fever for years. I have never, so far as I can remember, for ten or twelve years lost a single patient And in describing a Memorial Cottage Hospital, in which he had practised, he states:— “ In this hospital for the thirteen months there have been about forty cases of accidents, rheumatic fever, bronchitis, diseases of the joints, &c., which in the ordinary course would be considered to require stimu- lants, and they have all been treated by the medical men in the town, according to their cases, without any stimulants, except in one case, which died.” Another medical man writes as follows :— “ During the thirty-seven years of my practice as a total abstainer, I have never 2cscd one drop of alcohol as a medicine. Four years ago, in the town in which I