Democratic Sentinel, Volume 9, Number 26, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 July 1885 — An Alcoholic Trance. [ARTICLE]

An Alcoholic Trance.

A remarkable case —that of a physician of some prominence in this citywill furnish a clearer conception of what is meant by alcoholic trance than could be done by pages of abstract description. This gentleman inherited from liis father a tendency to periodical indulgence in alcoholic stimulants, which never attacks him unless he has performed an important operation, lost a patient by death, or encountered some crisis in his affairs. The first symptom is a sense of nervous prostration, followed by an inexorable craving for brandy, which, if resolutely denied at the moment, waxes more and more imperious, until denial is out of the question. Tired out with the struggle, he yields at last and takes a mere thimbleful of cognac—the beverage especially craved at such times. The drop of cognac is the signal for the mental transformation that follows. Sometimes he shuts himself up in his

room with a bottle of brandy at In* elbow, denies himself alike to visitors and to patients, and indulges in a protracted and solitary symposium—if that term may be applied to a bout in which no seoond person is included. Generally, when he emerges from his room and his trance he has no knowledge of what has taken place. He remembers that he did not feel exactly well and took a nip of brandy; but from the moment of that event until he awoke as from a troubled dream, memory is a perfect blank. At other times, instead of shutting himself up in solitude with his bottle, he attends to business as usual, collecting and paying bills, giving and taking receipts, banking, visiting patients and prescribing for them as lucidly and correctly as though in his normal condition—and all this without exciting a suspicion that he is not in his proper mind, his conversation being as consecutive and coherent as ever, and his manner the same as ordinary. He continues in this condition sometimes for a whole day, retires to bed, and wakes up the next morning without the least recollection of the .events of the day before; not even the vague reminiscences of a troubled dream remaining to mark the period of trance through which he has so recently passed. : —New York Times.