Medicine: Drunks and Doctors

In Philadelphia last week, some 75 experts of the Research Council on Problems of Alcohol held a symposium on the evils of drink. With scientific gusto they tore The Drunkard limb from limb, laid bare his heart, brain, blood, stomach, nerves. They shook his family tree, examined his jail record, dissected his education, wagged their heads over his abuse of Wife & Child. As they drifted out of meetings and refreshed themselves with cocktails, many of the experts confessed that they had no idea of how to cure The Drunkard. Some doctors thought it was a chemical job. Some criminologists said it was a public health problem; some psychiatrists laid the blame on family and schools.

The dean of U. S. physiologists, Chicago's Anton Julius Carlson, declared that the problem of alcoholism "is too complex for any one of our biological and medical disciplines. The sociologist should be present at the start, and I imagine we will not travel very far before we ask for the aid of the genetecist and the educator. [It] . . . is going to be a labor of Hercules."

Funny. Psychiatrist Bernard Glueck of Ossining, N. Y. thought his colleagues were beating about the bush. "It is difficult,'' said he, "not to be somewhat amused by this general tendency to put all faith in more research as the solution." Physicians, said he, know enough to cure drunkenness. There are as many varieties of alcoholics as there are cabbages: some have an inferiority complex; some learn in college; others are social misfits or homosexuals. Psychiatrists can cure most alcoholics, provided that: 1) the patient really wants to be cured; 2) he stays with the doctor long enough; 3) the doctor stays with him.

In Dr. Glueck's opinion, drunkenness is a problem because the public thinks it's funny. What the U. S. needs, he says, is a newfangled temperance campaign, something like the current campaigns against tuberculosis and syphilis.

Abnormal Teetotalers. Quite a different note was sounded in the proceedings by Sociologist Jeremiah Patrick Shalloo of the University of Pennsylvania. Said he, in his hardheaded Irish way:

"It is culturally imperative to toast the bride, christen the ship, seal the bargain, speed the friend, salute the New Year, celebrate good fortune, wake the dead, and even symbolize and ingest the blood of the Savior through the medium of alcohol. . . . With so many various forms of culturally approved drinking, the amazing result is that we have so few persons emotionally dependent upon alcohol in some form. The teetotaler is, after all, equally as abnormal from the cultural standpoint as is the habitual drinker. . . . There is definite cultural relativity, and no universally valid generalization can be made as to what constitutes socially acceptable drunkenness."

Concluding that "social habits which develop in response to cultural sanctions cannot be eliminated by sumptuary legislation," he pointed to the complete failure of prohibition in the U. S. as "eloquent testimony of the essentially alcoholic nature of contemporary American culture."

Hangover Over? Dr. Wilfred Bloomberg of Harvard told his colleagues about "the most effective modern drug for relief of hangover": benzedrine sulfate (known to college crammers as "pep pills").