The American issue. [volume], March 01, 1912, Page 6, Image 8

About The American issue. [volume] (Westerville, Ohio) 1912-19??

Image provided by: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library, Urbana, IL

                
* SCIENTIFIC TEMPERANCE DEPARTMENT j
Conducted by ROBERT B. PATTON, D. D.
v—--——=m —;
The development of the life insur
ance business has led, both in this
country and Europe, to a recognition
of the importance of educating the
general public in the essentials to
health. In Germany, where working
men’s insurance has been extensively
established, the result has been that
the imperial health bureau, allied gov
ernment institutions, and the insur
ance societies themselves, simply as a
matter of good business administra
tion, have undertaken an immense
amount of education in hygiene. Sev
eral of the American life insurance so
cieties are doing similar work, issu
ing health bulletins and papers to their
policy holders. With good health and
long life, profitable business is the
sequence from the company’s stand
point. The policy holder, his family
and the general public are the gainers
in the maintenance of good health
and the prolongation of life.
In all this educational work, alcohol
as a factor in causing disease, is be
ing vigorously combatted. The ex
perience of British companies which
for many years have kept abstainers
and non-abstainers in separate sec
tions, has shown incontestably the
better health and longer life, on the
average, of the abstainer over the
even so-called “moderate” drinker.
One of these societies lately paid
policy-holders in the abstaining sec
tion a bonus for five years on $5,000
which exceeded by from $90 to $225
the bonus paid non-abstainers for the
same time and amount.
Dr. Eugene L. Fisk, medical direct
or of the Postal Life Assurance So
ciety of New York, in a recent article
stated that “in recent years all life
insurance companies have discrimin
ated against the steady tippler and
the periodical free drinker. We know
from the collective experience of 33
ilfe insurance societies extending over
thirty years that accepted risks giv
ing a history of former intemperance
show a very high rate of mortality
about 36 per cent above the normal
average although such risks are al
ways critically examined before ac
ceptance.”
Not Purely Business Issue.
This is not purely a business matter
but one that concerns public health
since it indicates the extent to which
a growing drink habit jeopardizes that
health. The young man has to con
sider that the drink habit may pre
vent his getting life insurance protec
tion at all. Already in Great Britain
the drinker’s insurance costs him more
than that of the abstainer, for the lat
ter proves the better risk.
Insurance statistics show, too, that
0
the death rate among drinkers is heav
iest in the prime of life, the years
when they are most needed by their
families and the community. As a
mere matter of dollars and cents it is
a wasteful performance for the state
to expend several thousands of dol
lars in raising a man to maturity and
then have him cut off prematurely by
preventable disease. For this one
facts needs to be repeatedly empha
sized, that alcoholism and all the
varied bodily weaknesses to which the
alcohol habit contributes are absolute
ly preventable. No man need have
any of that disease. He may contract
typhoid or small-pox unawares, but
he can absolutely avoid the dis
ease due to alcohol.
Physicians, state and local boards
of health, the legislature, are uniting
to check and remove all possible
causes of disease so that, as far as
the state can do so, the individual
may be protected. There are always
those who wilfully violate the laws of
health, but the state assumes that it
is its duty to make such violation as
difficult as possible. Hence there are
requirements for care of garbage, for
removal of other wastes, for ensuring
pure milk, water and ice supplies, for
proper ventilation of buildings, laws
forbidding the sale of impure foods
or requiring isolation in the case of
infectious diseases, etc.
In the light of modern medical
science which declares that alcohol is
a prolific source, directly or indirect
ly, of disease, the public is confronted
with a question of public health in
deciding upon methods of dealing
with the alcohol question.
There is really even more need of
protection againts alcoholic liquors
than against other sources of disease.
Practically one of the latter are in
tentionally promoted by great busi
ness interests as is the use of alcohol.
The use of impure food, as experi
ence with small-pox or typhoid does
not make the victim eager to repeat the
“indulgence.” But the alcohol which
causes disease tends to create a crav
ing of more of itself.
The Regular Drinker.
George E. Petty, M. D.
in the Journal of the American
Medical Association.
The prolonged and free use of al
cohol brings serious impairment of
the digestive organs, the appetite is
variable or absent altogether unless
freshly stimulated by an extra drink
and if, at this or any subsequent
stage, the victim makes an effort to
discontinue drinking, such a state of
nervousness arises as to drive him to
resume the stimulant. The entire
system has by this time become so
saturated with toxic matter that a
condition of intolerable nervousness
arises whenever the system is allowed
to get from under the now sedative
effects of alcohol, and no matter how
acutely conscious the victim may
have become of his slavery to alcohol
or how heroically he may struggle to
throw off the yoke, he finds himself
unable to do so by his own efforts.
The prolonged free use of alcohol
brings on such disorders of the sys
tem as to lead the best of men, when
in its grasp, to continue to seek relief
from these disorders by increasing
the quantity of alcohol consumed.
Whether that course is imperatively
necessary or not, it appears to them
as being the one readily available
remedy, the panacea for every ill, and
it is so used.
A majority of habitual users of alco
hol in this country belong to this
class, and many of them would glad
ly quit drinking if they could ever get
the poison out of their systems and
reach a state in which they could live
in comfort without it, but they seem
never to be able to do so. They never
become entirely sober and their sys
tems are never normally free from the
products of tissue waste; on the con
trary they are in an extremely toxic
condition and are comfortable only
when the paralyzing effects of alco
hol blunts their sensibilities to the
irritating effects of this poison.”
There is a wide disagreement be
tween the doctors and the saloonists
as to the physiological effects of al
cohol. The liquor vender will tell you
that alcohol warms the stomach, aids
digestion, cools the brain, warms the
body in cold weather and cools it in
warm weather, strengthens the mus
cles, relieves fatigue, protects against
diseases, is a splendid therapeutic
agent in wounds—in fact, in his
opinion, alcohol is a universal cure-all
for all the ills that flesh is heir to.
On the other hand, the overwhelm
ing majority of up-to-date physicians
declare alcohol is a brain poison, a
nerve poison, a cell poison, a muscle
poison, that it interferes with tissue
building, weakens the bodily defences
against disease, impairs functional
activities, induces growth of degener
ative connective tissue, produces fat
ty degeneration of heart muscles, irri
tation, hyperaemia often attended with
hemorrhage, etc., etc. The saloon
keeper versus the physicians! Dol
lars to doughnuts the doctors are
right.
Whenever there is an honest pur
pose and an honest effort on the part
of judge, attorney general,, sheriff,
constables and policemen to enforce
the law, little trouble is experienced
in enforcing the prohibition law.—At
lanta Georgian.