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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