from the curse of drink, and the public needs to be more generally
advised of what they are doing.




CHAPTER VIII.

INEBRIATE ASYLUMS.


The careful observation and study of inebriety by medical men, during
the past twenty-five or thirty years, as well in private practice as in
hospitals and prisons, has led them to regard it as, in many of its
phases, a disease needing wise and careful treatment. To secure such
treatment was seen to be almost impossible unless the subject of
intemperance could be removed from old associations and influences, and
placed under new conditions, in which there would be no enticement to
drink, and where the means of moral and physical recovery could be
judiciously applied. It was felt that, as a disease, the treatment of
drunkenness, while its subject remained in the old atmosphere of
temptation, was as difficult, if not impossible, as the treatment of a
malarious fever in a miasmatic district. The result of this view was the
establishment of Inebriate Asylums for voluntary or enforced seclusion,
first in the United States, and afterwards in England and some of her
dependencies.

In the beginning, these institutions did not have much favor with the
public; and, as the earlier methods of treatment pursued therein were,
for the most part, experimental, and based on a limited knowledge of