“We have observed that in many instances the fact of the patient being convinced that he is an hereditary inebriate, has produced beneficial results.  Summoning to his aid all the latent counterbalancing energies which he has at command, and clothing himself with this armor, he goes forth to war, throws up the fortifications of physical and mental restraint, repairs the breaches and inroads of diseased appetite, regains control of the citadel of the brain, and then, with shouts of triumph, he unfurls the banner of ‘VICTORY!’”

Dr. Wood, of London, in his work on insanity, speaking on the subject of hereditary inebriety, says: 

“Instances are sufficiently familiar, and several have occurred within my own personal knowledge, where the father, having died at any early age from the effects of intemperance, has left a son to be brought up by those who have severely suffered from his excesses, and have therefore the strongest motives to prevent, if possible, a repetition of such misery; every pain has been taken to enforce sobriety, and yet, notwithstanding all precautions, the habits of the father have become those of the son, who, never having seen him from infancy, could not have adopted them from imitation.  Everything was done to encourage habits of temperance, but all to no purpose; the seeds of the disease had begun to germinate; a blind impulse led the doomed individual, by successive and rapid strides, along the same course which was fatal to the father, and which, ere long, terminated in his own destruction.”

How great and fearful the power of an appetite which cannot only enslave and curse the man over which it gains control, but send its malign influence down to the second and third and fourth generations, sometimes to the absolute

EXTINGUISHMENT OF FAMILIES!

Morel, a Frenchman, gives the following as the result of his observation of the hereditary effects of drunkenness: 

“First generation:  Immorality, depravity, excess in the use of alcoholic liquors, moral debasement. Second generation:  Hereditary drunkenness, paroxysms of mania, general paralysis. Third generation:  Sobriety, hypochondria, melancholy, systematic ideas of being persecuted, homicidal tendencies. Fourth generation:  Intelligence slightly developed, first accessions of mania at sixteen years of age, stupidity, subsequent idiocy and probable extinction of family.”

Dr. T.D.  Crothers, in an analysis of the hundred cases of inebriety received at the New York Inebriate Asylum, gives this result:  “Inebriety inherited direct from parents was traced in twenty-one cases.  In eleven of these the father drank alone, in six instances the mother drank, and in four cases both parents drank.

“In thirty-three cases inebriety was traced to ancestors more remote, as grandfather, grandmother, etc., etc., the collateral branches exhibiting both inebriety and insanity.  In some instances a whole generation had been passed over, and the disorders of the grandparents appeared again.