The remodeling power or alcohol is marvelous, and usually appalling. It seems to open a manner of entrance into the soul for all categories of foolish, insane or malignant spirits, who, thus long as it remains up-to-date with the brain, are ready to hold possession. Men of the kindest nature when sober, act typically like fiends when drunk. Crimes and outrages are committed, that shock and shame the perpetrators when the thrill of inebriation has passed away. Referring to the current subject, Dr. Henry Munroe says:
“It appears from the experience of Mr. Fletcher, who has paid a lot of attention to the cases of drunkards, from the remarks of Mr. Dunn, in his ‘Medical Psychology,’ and from observations of my own, that there’s some analogy between our physical and psychical natures; for, as the physical half people, when its power is at a low ebb, becomes prone of morbid influences that, in full vigor, would skip it while not result, thus when the psychical (synonymous with the ethical ) half of the brain has its healthy function disturbed and deranged by the introduction of a morbid poison like alcohol, the individual therefore circumstanced sinks in depravity, and “becomes the helpless subject of the forces of evil, “that are powerless against a nature free from the morbid influences of alcohol.”
Completely different persons are affected in several ways by the identical poison. Indulgence in alcoholic drinks might act upon one or more of the cerebral organs; and, as its necessary consequence, the manifestations of useful disturbance can follow in such of the mental powers as these organs subserve. If the indulgence be continued, then, either from deranged nutrition or organic lesion, manifestations formerly developed only throughout a match of intoxication might become permanent , and terminate in insanity or dypso-mania. M. Flourens first noticed the fact that certain morbific agents, when introduced into this of the circulation, tend to act primarily and specially on one nervous centre as opposed to that of another, by virtue of some special elective affinity between such morbific agents and bound ganglia. So, within the tottering gait of the tipsy man, we tend to see the influence of alcohol upon the functions of the cerebellum within the impairment of its power of co-ordinating the muscles.
Bound writers on diseases of the mind make especial allusion to that kind of insanity termed ‘dypsomania’, in that someone has an unquenchable thirst for alcoholic drinks a tendency as decidedly maniacal as that of homicidal mania ; or the uncontrollable want to burn, termed pyromania ; or to steal, referred to as kleptomania.
Homicidal mania.
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The various tendencies of homicidal mania in numerous people are usually only nursed into action when the current of the blood has been poisoned with alcohol. I had a case of a one who, whenever his brain was thus excited, told me that he experienced a most uncontrollable desire to kill or injure some one; so abundant so, that he may sometimes hardly restrain himself from the action, and was obliged to refrain from all stimulants, lest, in an unlucky moment, he would possibly commit himself. Townley, who murdered the young woman of his affections, for which he was sentenced to be imprisoned in a very lunatic asylum always, poisoned his brain with brandy and soda-water before he committed the rash act. The brandy stimulated into action certain portions of the brain, that acquired such a power on subjugate his will, and hurry him to the performance of a frightful deed, opposed alike to his better judgment and his ordinary desires.
As to pyromania , some years ago I knew a laboring man during a country village, who, whenever he had had some glasses of ale at the general public-house, would chuckle with delight at the thought of firing sure gentlemen’s stacks. However, when his brain was free from the poison, a quieter, higher-disposed man could not be. Sadly, he became dependent on habits of intoxication; and, one night, underneath alcoholic excitement, fired some stacks belonging to his employers, for that, he was sentenced for fifteen years to a penal settlement, where his brain would never again be alcoholically excited.
Kleptomania.
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Next, I can give an example of kleptomania . I knew, several years ago, a very clever, industrious and proficient young man, who told me that whenever he had been drinking, he could hardly face up to, the temptation of stealing anything that came in his method; but that these feelings never troubled him at alternative times. One afternoon, once he had been indulging together with his fellow-workmen in drink, his will, unfortunately, was overpowered, and he took from the mansion where he was operating some articles of price, for which he was accused, and afterwards sentenced to a term of imprisonment. When set at liberty he had the good fortune to be placed among some kind-hearted persons, vulgarly referred to as teetotallers ; and, from conscientious motives, signed the PLEDGE, currently above twenty years ago. From that point to the present moment he has never experienced the overmastering want that therefore typically beset him in his drinking days to require that which wasn’t his own. Moreover, no pretext on earth may now entice him to style of any liquor containing alcohol, feeling that, underneath its influence, he may again fall its victim. He holds an influential position within the town where he resides.
I have known some women of excellent position in society, who, when a dinner or supper-party, and when having taken sundry glasses of wine, might not face up to the temptation of taking home any little article not their own, when the opportunity offered; and who, in their sober moments, have came back them, as if taken by mistake. We have many instances recorded in our police reports of gentlemen of position, beneath the influence of drink, committing thefts of the foremost paltry articles, afterwards came to the owners by their friends, which can solely be accounted for, psychologically, by the fact {that the} can had been for the time utterly overpowered by the refined influence of alcohol.
Loss of mental clearness.
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Alcohol, whether taken in large or tiny doses, immediately disturbs the natural functions of the mind and body, is currently conceded by the foremost eminent physiologists. Dr. Brinton says: ‘Mental acuteness, accuracy of conception, and delicacy of the senses, are all thus far opposed by the action of alcohol, as that the maximum efforts of each are incompatible with the ingestion of any moderate amount of fermented liquid. Indeed, there’s scarcely any calling which demands skillful and exact effort of mind and body, or that requires the balanced exercise of many schools, that doesn’t illustrate this rule. The mathematician, the gambler, the metaphysician, the billiard-player, the author, the artist, the physician, would, if they may analyze their expertise aright, generally concur in the statement, that one glass can usually suffice to take , so to talk, the sting off each mind and body , and to cut back their capability to one thing below what is relatively their perfection of work.
A train was driven carelessly into one amongst the principal London stations, running into another train, killing, by the collision, six or seven persons, and injuring many others. From the proof at the inquest, it appeared {that the} guard was reckoned sober, only he had had two glasses of ale with an addict at a previous station. Now, reasoning psychologically, these two glasses of ale had probably been instrumental in beginning the sting from his perceptions and prudence, and producing a carelessness or boldness of action which would not have occurred below the cooling, temperate influence of a beverage free from alcohol. Several persons have admitted to me that they were not the same after taking even one glass of ale or wine that they were before, and could not completely trust themselves once that they had taken this single glass.
Impairment of memory.
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An impairment of the memory is among the early symptoms of alcoholic derangement.
“This,” says Dr. Richardson, “extends even to forgetfulness of the most common things; to names of acquainted persons, to dates, to duties of daily life. Unusually, too,” he adds, “this failure, like that which indicates, within the aged, the age of second childishness and mere oblivion, does not extend to the things of the past, however is confined to events that are passing. On recent recollections the mind retains its power; on new ones it needs constant prompting and sustainment.”
In this failure of memory nature offers a solemn warning that imminent peril is at hand. Well for the habitual drinker if he heed the warning. Ought to he not do so, symptoms of a more serious character will, in time, develop themselves, as the brain becomes a lot of and a lot of diseased, ending, it might be, in permanent insanity.
Mental and moral diseases.
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Of the mental and moral diseases which too usually follow the regular drinking of alcohol, we tend to have painful records in asylum reports, in medical testimony and in our daily observation and experience. These are therefore full and varied, and thrust so constantly on our attention, {that the} wonder is that men don’t seem to be afraid to run the terrible risks involved even in what is referred to as the moderate use of alcoholic beverages.
In 1872, a choose committee of the House of Commons, appointed “to think about the simplest set up for the management and management of habitual drunkards,” known as upon some of the most eminent medical men in Great Britain to give their testimony in answer to a massive number of queries, embracing each topic among the range of inquiry, from the pathology of inebriation to the practical usefulness of prohibitory laws. During this testimony much was said about the result of alcoholic stimulation on the mental condition and ethical character. One physician, Dr. James Crichton Brown, who, in ten years’ experience as superintendent of lunatic asylums, has paid special attention to the relations of habitual drunkenness to insanity, having fastidiously examined five hundred cases, testified that alcohol, taken in excess, made totally different types of mental disease, of that he mentioned four classes: 1. Mania a potu , or alcoholic mania. 2. The monomania of suspicion. 3. Chronic alcoholism, characterised by failure of the memory and power of judgment, with partial paralysis usually ending fatally. 4. Dypsomania, or an irresistible probing for alcoholic stimulants, occuring very frequently, paroxysmally, and with constant liability to periodical exacerbations, when the craving becomes altogether uncontrollable. Of this latter kind of disease, he says: “This can be invariably related to a bound impairment of the intellect, and of the affections and therefore the ethical powers .”
Dr. Alexander Peddie, a physician of over thirty-seven years’ practice in Edinburgh, gave, in his evidence, many remarkable instances of the moral perversions that followed continued drinking.
Relation between insanity and drunkenness.
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Dr. John Nugent said that his experience of twenty-six years among lunatics, led him to believe that there’s a very close relation between the results of the abuse of alcohol and insanity. The population of Ireland had decreased, he said, 2 millions in twenty-5 years, but there was the identical amount of insanity currently that there was before. He attributed this, in a very great measure, to indulgence in drink.
Dr. Arthur Mitchell, Commissioner of Lunacy for Scotland, testified {that the} excessive use of alcohol caused a giant amount of the lunacy, crime and pauperism of that country. In some men, he said, habitual drinking leads to different diseases than insanity, because the result is always in the direction of the proclivity, but it is sure that there are many in whom there’s a transparent proclivity to insanity, who would escape that dreadful consummation but for drinking; excessive drinking in many persons determining the insanity to that they’re, well, predisposed . The kids of drunkards, he more said, are in an exceedingly larger proportion idiotic than different youngsters, and in a larger proportion become themselves drunkards; they’re conjointly in a larger proportion liable to the normal types of acquired insanity.
Dr. Winslow Forbes believed that within the habitual drunkard the whole nervous structure, and the brain particularly, became poisoned by alcohol. All the mental symptoms which you see accompanying normal intoxication, he remarks, result from the poisonous effects of alcohol on the brain. It’s the brain which is mainly effected. In temporary drunkenness, the brain becomes in an abnormal state of alimentation, and if this habit is persisted in for years, the nervous tissue itself becomes permeated with alcohol, and organic changes occur within the nervous tissues of the brain, producing that frightful and dreadful chronic insanity which we tend to see in lunatic asylums, traceable entirely to habits of intoxication . A massive proportion of frightful mental and brain disturbances can, he declared, be traced to the drunkenness of parents.
Dr. D.G. Dodge, late of the New York State Inebriate Asylum, who, with. Dr. Joseph Parrish, gave testimony before the committee of the House of Commons, said, in one in every of his answers: “With the excessive use of alcohol, functional disorder will invariably seem, and no organ can be a lot of seriously affected, and probably impaired, than the brain. This is often shown in the inebriate by a weakened intellect, a general debility of the mental schools , a partial or total loss of self-respect, and a departure of the power of self-command; all of which, acting together, place the victim at the mercy of a depraved and morbid appetite, and build him utterly powerless, by his own unaided efforts, to secure his recovery from the disease that is destroying him.” And he adds: “I’m of opinion that there is a “nice similarity between inebriety and insanity.
“I am decidedly of opinion that the former has taken its place in the family of diseases as prominently as its twin-brother insanity; and, for my part, the day isn’t far distant when the pathology of the former will be as absolutely understood and as successfully treated as the latter, and even additional successfully, since it is more at intervals the reach and bounds of human management, that, wisely exercised and scientifically administered, may prevent curable inebriation from verging into doable incurable insanity.”
General impairment of the faculties.
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Dr. Richardson, speaking of the action of alcohol on the mind, offers the following unhappy image of its ravages:
“An analysis of the condition of the mind induced and maintained by the free daily use of alcohol as a drink, reveals a singular order of facts. The manifestation fails altogether to reveal the exaltation of any reasoning power in a helpful or satisfactory direction. I have never met with an instance in which such a claim for alcohol has been made. Quite the opposite, confirmed alcoholics constantly say that for this or that job, requiring thought and a focus, it is necessary to forego some of the usual potations in order to have a cool head for laborious work.
“On the other side, the expertise is overwhelmingly in favor of the observation that the utilization of “alcohol sells the reasoning powers, “create weak men and ladies the easy prey of the wicked and sturdy, and leads men and women who ought to know better into each grade of misery and vice. If, then, alcohol enfeebles the rationale, what half of the mental constitution does it exalt and excite? It excites and exalts those animal, organic, emotional centres of mind which, in the dual nature of man, thus often cross and oppose that pure and abstract reasoning nature that lifts man higher than the lower animals, and rightly exercised, little below the angels.
It excites man’s worst passions.
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Exciting these animal centres, it lets loose all the passions, and offers them more or less of unlicensed dominion over the man. It excites anger, and when it does not lead to this extreme, it keeps the mind fretful, irritable, dissatisfied and captious…. And if I were to require you thru all the passions, love, hate, lust, envy, avarice and pride, I ought to but show you that alcohol ministers to all; that, paralyzing the explanation, it takes from off these passions that fine adjustment of reason, which places man above the lower animals. From the beginning to the top of its influence it subdues reason and sets the passions free. The analogies, physical and mental, are perfect. That that loosens the stress of the vessels that feed the body with due order and precision, and, thereby, lets loose the guts to violent excess and unbridled motion, loosens, also, the rationale and lets loose the passion. In both instances, heart and head are, for a time, out of harmony; their balance broken. The person descends nearer and closer to the lower animals. From the angels he glides farther and farther away.
A sad and terrible picture.
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The damaging effects of alcohol on the human mind gift, finally, the saddest image of its influence. The foremost aesthetic artist will find no angel here. All is animal, and animal of the worst type. Memory irretrievably lost, words and very parts of speech forgotten or words displaced to possess no that means in them. Rage and anger persistent and mischievous, or remittent and impotent. Concern at each corner of life, distrust on every side, grief merged into blank despair, hopelessness into permanent melancholy. Surely no Pandemonium that ever poet dreamt of could equal that which would exist if all the drunkards of the globe were driven into one mortal sphere.
As I’ve got moved among people who are physically stricken with alcohol, and have detected underneath the numerous disguises of name the fatal diseases, the pains and penalties it imposes on the body, the image has been sufficiently cruel. However even that picture pales, as I conjure up, while not any stretch of imagination, the devastations that the same agent inflicts on the mind. Forty per cent., the learned Superintendent of Colney Hatch, Dr. Sheppard, tells us, of those that were brought into that asylum in 1876, were so brought as a result of of the direct or indirect effects of alcohol. If the facts of all the asylums were collected with equal care, the same tale would, I fear, be told. What need we tend to additional to indicate the damaging action on the human mind? The Pandemonium of drunkards; the grand transformation scene of that pantomime of drink which commences with, moderation! Let it never additional be forgotten by people who love their fellow-men till, through their efforts, it’s closed forever.”
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MRI of the spine:-