Democratic Sentinel, Volume 6, Number 52, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 January 1883 — About Drinking Men. [ARTICLE]

About Drinking Men.

As a drinking man myself, unfortunately known better for that one failing than for my many virtues, let me say a word about drinking men, their modes of thought, their habits, the causes of the disease, habit or vice, as the reader chooses to call it. lam not a believer in the theory of dipsomania. I know that it has a few eminent advocates among medical men. I have sought information from the doctors of several inebriate asylums and hospitals, and have had the privilege of consulting the distinguished Superintendent of one insane asylum upon whom inebriates are forced by the certificates of convenient physicians (signed, patient unseen, as carelessly as a recommendation for office), and I have read a good deal on the, to me, interesting subject. If I was the victim of an uncontrollable appetite I wanted to know it. It was a curious mental problem to me. Perhaps, I thought, if I and a lot of other apparently pretty good fellows I have been cloistered with, are dipsomaniacs, some of us may next develop a homicidal tendency or a desire to burn bams., Well, the result of my observation and reading is that there is no such tfylng as dipsomania. It is nothing but plain, old-fasliioned drunk. The drunkard, ninety-nine times in a hundred, is as much responsible for what he does when he is drunk as the man is who kills another in anger. The so-called dipsomaniac gets drunk because he wants to; he likes the effect of whisky. He may have any one of a dozen reasons for it—poverty, disappointment, toothache, family difficulties, idleness—‘but none pf them should .excuse him if, under the influence of liquor, he commits a crime. Like the victims of opium, the habit is often carried to an extent that a sudden cessation of stimulants is almost certain death. No, dipsomania is a sentimental humbug and a social fiction of the scientific parlor fireworks of medical men of the Advanced school, men like Dr. Beard and the epigrammatic, if not deep, Dr. Spitzka.— G. H. Butler.