The Father Murphy Institute for Inebriates : an efficacious and permanent cure for drunkenness, morphia and kindred habits : endorsed and endowed by the governments of Quebec and Nova Scotia (Canada).

  • Father Murphy Institute for Inebriates (London, England)
Date:
[1897?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Father Murphy Institute for Inebriates : an efficacious and permanent cure for drunkenness, morphia and kindred habits : endorsed and endowed by the governments of Quebec and Nova Scotia (Canada). Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the Universal Medical Sciences,” says: “Nothing in the line of medical progress has been more satisfactory than the increasing recognition, within recent years, of the disease aspect of inebriety. A quarter of a century ago, practically the whole religious and tem¬ perance worlds and nearly all the medical profession saw in drunken¬ ness only the voluntary gratification of vicious desires, and de¬ nounced drunkards as willing and wilful offenders against order and morality. Punishment was considered the best method of dealing with it, as it was regarded as a crime. Now, happily, all is changed. Clergymen, lawyers, and social reformers vie with police magistrates in insisting on the diseased condition of many inebriates, while boards of poor law guardians pass resolutions calling for the treatment of the drunkard as a sick patient, not as a criminal transgressor.” The undisputed results of treatment are the best evidence of which view is right, the old or the new. Treated as a vice, of the millions who have been the special sub¬ jects of moral suasion the percentage of those rescued is not 5 per cent. Treated as a disease, the Father Murphy Gold Cure reaps an absolute harvest of not less than 95 per cent, of patients, and in every case where the patient is cured, if the patient is not willingly, aye, wilfully, at fault, the result is permanent. Let it not be understood that our method of treatment loses sight of the value of moral suasion and the strenuous exercise of normal will-power. On the contrary, we deem the moral agency an absolutely essential counterpart to our treatment. But in a great many cases of drunkenness, before any moral forces can produce their normal effect, an existing physical disease must first be removed. Our gold treat¬ ment produces in the wrecked constitution of the drunkard those physical, or rather physiological conditions which are absolutely necessary to, and which alone make possible for him, the free and healthy exercise of his moral nature. And it is owing to this fact that to-day we hold, in our hands abundance of undeniable proof that our treatment has rescued thousands of men and women from the verge of physical and moral ruin, and made them once more good and useful citizens. The most earnest prayers and exhortations from, the pulpit and temperance platform, the earnest pleadings of friends, the prayers and tears of mothers and sisters and wives all failed. But a remedy was found in our gold treatment. To-day their prayers are prayers of thankfulness, their tears are tears of joy, and the wounded hearts are healed.