Wednesday, July 22, 2015

E.L. Stamey Speaks in Favor of Prohibition, 1914

“Day of Alcohol Is Practically Gone” from The Review, High Point, N.C., July 30, 1914

Dr. E.L. Stamey Spoke to Students of Summer School Monday
With an emphatic declaration of belief that the day is not far distant when alcohol with its long train of broken hearts, blighted hopes, wasted fortunes and outraged humanity will be no more, Dr. E.L. Stamey Monday closed a clear and forceful lecture before the faculty and young women of the Normal college summer school. Dr. Stamey, who is medical director of the Keely institute and a recognized authority on alcoholism, had been invited to discuss the subject of alcoholism and its effects from a medical standpoint. His statements of fact with observations and pertinent comments covered a large range. In its freedom from technicalities, the lecture derived force and the graphic pictures which the clear-cut, pungent sentences portrayed carried to each hearer a conviction of duty to enlist in the campaign of education for which the speaker appealed. For it is in the education of youth that Dr. Stamey hopes to accomplish the final and absolute eliminations of alcohol.

The speaker expressed surprise that the subject had been so long neglected by the schools and outlined the advantages which might accrue from lectures on the physical effects of alcohol at least twice a year in every school of the land.

“If I could get the ear of the school child and teach him or her the awful effects of alcohol upon the human system I would soon arouse a sentiment so great against the curse of liquor that the moral results of temperance, so long and so rightfully advocated, would follow a matter of course,” he declared.

Speaking of the unusual forms of indulgence, the speaker declared there are a great many men and some women who are addicted to the use of alcohol and who are almost daily getting drunk who never pretend to taste whiskey, brandy, beer or alcohol in any of the forms in which it is usually taken. This reference was to patent medicine addicts and was followed by references to experiences unusual to the average man.

As a producer of disease, alcohol was soundly scored.

Concluding his appeal for education, Dr. Stamey said: “We must teach the boys of this land that they cannot afford to drink. Men have no right to drink liquor and when they assume such a right, and I hear them talking about it, they make me sick. If a man could take wings and fly away to some unknown country to the unknown or unknowable, where there was no other human being except himself—no mother to week, no wife to shed tears and send up its piteous wail because of the curse of drink; even there it would be a curse and a sin to drink liquor because of its harmful effects upon the human system. How much more sinful and unreasonable for men to drink in an enlightened land where they not only outrage their bodies, their faculties and their organs which were created for noble purposes, but where there are others also to suffer as well?

As a final warning to the young women composing his audience the speaker said: “The young women of our land must be taught that they cannot afford to marry men that drink, that they had better die and be carried to their graves in their innocency and purity than to be tied to a man whose very being has been debauched by liquor. They should be taught it is dangerous to associate with such men. There are a great many in the country today who are walking degenerates because of the influence of drink. You can see them on the street corners, and I am sorry to say very often at public functions standing around as the big fellows of the community; but they are nothing more than moral vultures flying around in their murky skies ready at the first opportunity to swoop down upon and devour some pure innocent, unsuspecting young woman.”

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