22. THE INEBRIATE; Hereditary and Grandma

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I have elsewhere stated my own case with but slight reserve, because, out of the mystery of this iniquity, one may not with safety speak positively of another’s. I have described myself as a “congenital periodical” inebriate, and have endeavored to make it clear to the reader as to myself that my tor­ment was inherited.

There is a little Dionysus in all of us

And yet I am of a family scrupulously abstemious in both sexes for several generations. Here is an apparent contradiction, apt to mislead the common mind, because it overlies a grave fact in our American social system. There is a disease of the nervous organism, almost peculiar to this people, which sprang from seeds of self-indulgence sown in the moral, social, and physical lives of our great- grandparents, and ‘which has acquired fearful aggravations of extension and virulence with each succeeding genera­tion. It assumes a form painfully fa­miliar to the physician and the moralist, in that craving for intellectual and physical “sensation ” which expresses itself; without a blush or a tremor, in the pop­ular performances, displays, and dis­closures, of the pulpit and the theatre, literature and art, the press and the criminal courts, the costumes of the women, the prodigality and license of private entertainment, and the graphic eccentricities of popular sports.

It does not necessarily take the direction of rum, – it may find relief in the intemperate, passionate pursuit of a vocation or an agitation. Its form of expression may be determined by the bent of the intellectual twig, or an early peep into “openings.” If God, in his mercy, had not suffered me to escape by the stormy Jordan of rum, I might have been a spasmodic editor, a fanatical dema­gogue, a champion revivalist, a plug- ugly, a lecturer for the Washingtonian Total Abstinence Society, or a – Fe­nian martyr.

If you would abolish the inebriate, you must begin with his grandmother.

Even a little Dionysus in Grandma

THANK YOU TO THE INEBRIATE – – – Whoever he was

 

 

 

 

 

21. THE INEBRIATE; Waiting for Family

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1849 gold rush, 1868 Presidential Election, A list of patients, A School for Scandal, Ability to pay, Admission Form, Albert Day, artists, asylum, Atlantic Monthly, Atlantic Monthy 1869, bankers, bar graph, Billiards, Binghamton, Blair, Bowling, brokers, chess, clerks, Committed patients, confined, Cornell's Making of America, cribbage, criminal, Curiosities, divines, Dr. Albert Day, Dr.Edward Turner, dramatists, Ethiopian Minstrel, euchre, Exercise Room, farmers, Female kin, Free Patients, Honorable Ausburn Birdsall, Humor, Inebriates, Involuntary Patients, Isaac Perry, Joseph Surface, Lady of Lyons, lawyers, Lectures, Legal Status, Legislative Body, Literary Exercises, Lunatic, Macbeth, Meeting Room, merchants, Mrs. Frank Ward, Music, musicians, novelists, NY State Inebriate Asylum, Old presidential posters, Old Woodcuts, Opera, Pantomime, Paying Patients, Phenomena, Philanthropic Societies, physicians, poets, police, priests, printers, Prodigal Son, Reading Room, Report to NY State, Room and Board, Rules of Admission, Sages, San Fran Cisco, scholars, Schuyler Colfax, Scientific American, Seymour, Still Water Runs Deep, teachers, Temperance, The Ollapod Club, Ulysses S. Grant, Vine Hall, Wit, writers

An Article Previously Written by our treasured author.
From THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, April 1869

In my paper preliminary to the present, in the April number of this magazine, I have entered my weary protest against that “sagacious pharisaism of the fam­ily, which consigns the poor prodigal heart, that has nothing left but its remnant of imperishable love, to the isolation of a Refuge such as this; and then, maintaining a savage silence, keeps it for weeks on the red-hot grid­iron of a longing suspense, in one pro­tracted nightmare and horror of devilish fancies and fears.”

Dispair

Since that was printed, one poor prodigal heart, – the gentlest, humblest, among us, impatient only with itself, – robbed of its remnant of imperishable love, and given over by that same savage silence to its loneli­ness and longing and despair, has taken its pitiful tax and trouble in its hand, and fled from the cruel respectability of fastidious Pharisees to the indiscrim­inate consolations of the Publican’s Christ.

20. THE INEBRIATE; One Last Quote from “The Report”

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1849 gold rush, 1868 Presidential Election, A list of patients, A School for Scandal, Ability to pay, Admission Form, Albert Day, artists, asylum, Atlantic Monthly, Atlantic Monthy 1869, bankers, bar graph, Billiards, Binghamton, Blair, Bowling, brokers, chess, clerks, Committed patients, confined, Cornell's Making of America, cribbage, criminal, Curiosities, divines, Dr. Albert Day, Dr.Edward Turner, dramatists, Ethiopian Minstrel, euchre, Exercise Room, farmers, Female kin, Free Patients, Honorable Ausburn Birdsall, Humor, Inebriates, Involuntary Patients, Isaac Perry, Joseph Surface, Lady of Lyons, lawyers, Lectures, Legal Status, Legislative Body, Literary Exercises, Lunatic, Macbeth, Meeting Room, merchants, Mrs. Frank Ward, Music, musicians, novelists, NY State Inebriate Asylum, Old presidential posters, Old Woodcuts, Opera, Pantomime, Paying Patients, Phenomena, Philanthropic Societies, physicians, poets, police, priests, printers, Prodigal Son, Reading Room, Report to NY State, Room and Board, Rules of Admission, Sages, San Fran Cisco, scholars, Schuyler Colfax, Scientific American, Seymour, Still Water Runs Deep, teachers, Temperance, The Ollapod Club, Ulysses S. Grant, Vine Hall, Wit, writers

 

A TYPICAL REPORT TO THE STATE

{The Inebriate quotes from a report to the state of NY}

“In this aspect of the subject it is of vital importance that the enterprise should be kept pure, and true to its original intention, by the exclusion, as far as possible, of involuntary patients, or at least of such as are brutally in‑sensible and rebellious. This Asylum, I take it, is designed to appeal confi­dently to the reason and conscience of a class neither mad nor utterly de­praved ; and, from the best of these, to restore to society and the state so Much of usefulness and ornament, hon­est productiveness and intellectual in­fluence, as will repay the Common­wealth tenfold for the cost of the experiment. To introduce, therefore, the element of confinement and coer­cion is to degrade the Institution from its true character, as a saving and en­nobling home of faith and inspiration, into a mere house of correction or a jail.”

“So, also, to receive within our walls the forced commitments of a court or the common seizures of the police is at once to impair, if not destroy, the phil­osophical value of the experiment, and, what is worse, to embarrass the disci­pline and lower the moral tone of our probationary household.”

 

19. THE INEBRIATE; Protection from the Law

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1849 gold rush, 1868 Presidential Election, A list of patients, A School for Scandal, Ability to pay, Admission Form, Albert Day, artists, asylum, Atlantic Monthly, Atlantic Monthy 1869, bankers, bar graph, Billiards, Binghamton, Blair, Bowling, brokers, chess, clerks, Committed patients, confined, Cornell's Making of America, cribbage, criminal, Curiosities, divines, Dr. Albert Day, Dr.Edward Turner, dramatists, Ethiopian Minstrel, euchre, Exercise Room, farmers, Female kin, Free Patients, Honorable Ausburn Birdsall, Humor, Inebriates, Involuntary Patients, Isaac Perry, Joseph Surface, Lady of Lyons, lawyers, Lectures, Legal Status, Legislative Body, Literary Exercises, Lunatic, Macbeth, Meeting Room, merchants, Mrs. Frank Ward, Music, musicians, novelists, NY State Inebriate Asylum, Old presidential posters, Old Woodcuts, Opera, Pantomime, Paying Patients, Phenomena, Philanthropic Societies, physicians, poets, police, priests, printers, Prodigal Son, Reading Room, Room and Board, Rules of Admission, Sages, San Fran Cisco, scholars, Schuyler Colfax, Scientific American, Seymour, Still Water Runs Deep, teachers, Temperance, The Ollapod Club, Ulysses S. Grant, Vine Hall, Wit, writers

Quantity of Inmates

Therefore the inebriate has his rights; but they are the rights of an occasional madman, however long and lucid his intervals may be ; and no man knows this bet­ter than himself. He knows that, un­der certain distracting circumstances of provocation or temptation, he may first or last almost certainly be­come an offence, if not a fear, to him­self and others, even when at large on his honorable parole, of which, at wiser times, when seated at the feet of the Gamaliel of his own prudence and duty, he is so tenderly jealous. Then the rude hand of the law, insensible to sen­timent and scornful of psychological analyses, will be laid upon him, a policeman’s coarse paw shall bruise the raw of his fierce sensitiveness. Just there his rights begin, and he naturally turns for them to the Asy­lum, which, as a mere matter of money not less than of morals, owes him a rescue; for she is his guardian under bonds, and has accepted in respect of him, for a consideration, certain posi­tive responsibilities and obligations._• Whether he can or cannot be trusted beyond bounds, is a question for the discretion of those having him in moral and medical charge, – a nice question, I grant, its safe decision implying the possession of a rare and fine combina­tion of experience with tact ; and occa­sional errors of judgment are inevitable. But it is certain the decision does not rest with him, nor is he responsible for the consequences of a blunder. His Asylum owes it to his friends, as well as to himself, to stand between him and the police, and to demand that he be restored, the moment his arrest be­comes necessary, to the custody of his appointed guardian and physician, the superintendent, whose demand should be a habeas corpus in this matter, – all charges to be paid by the Asylum, and collected from the patient. Just there his rights cease; he certainly has no right, in reason or feeling, to complain of the preventive punishment he may receive. But if he is not in an Asylum for this very protection, for what, in the name of common sense and busi­ness is he there? A passage from the Report will follow.

 

18. THE INEBRIATE; Gone are the Days

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1849 gold rush, 1868 Presidential Election, A list of patients, A School for Scandal, Ability to pay, Admission Form, Albert Day, artists, asylum, Atlantic Monthly, Atlantic Monthy 1869, bankers, Billiards, Binghamton, Blair, Bowling, brokers, chess, clerks, Committed patients, confined, Cornell's Making of America, cribbage, criminal, Curiosities, divines, Dr. Albert Day, Dr.Edward Turner, dramatists, Ethiopian Minstrel, euchre, Exercise Room, farmers, Female kin, Free Patients, Honorable Ausburn Birdsall, Humor, Inebriates, Involuntary Patients, Isaac Perry, Joseph Surface, Lady of Lyons, lawyers, Lectures, Legal Status, Legislative Body, Literary Exercises, Lunatic, Macbeth, Meeting Room, merchants, Mrs. Frank Ward, Music, musicians, novelists, NY State Inebriate Asylum, Old presidential posters, Old Woodcuts, Opera, Pantomime, Paying Patients, Phenomena, Philanthropic Societies, physicians, poets, priests, printers, Prodigal Son, Reading Room, Room and Board, Rules of Admission, Sages, San Fran Cisco, scholars, Schuyler Colfax, Scientific American, Seymour, Still Water Runs Deep, teachers, Temperance, The Ollapod Club, Ulysses S. Grant, Vine Hall, Wit, writers

Involuntary Patient of Yore

It is to be hoped that, lest legislative bodies and philanthropic communities, inspired by the assured success of this Binghamton experiment, should become prematurely engaged in this specialty of benevolent enterprise, the legal sta­tus of the inebriate may be clearly de­fined without loss of time. He is no longer to be coerced as a criminal or confined as a lunatic : once for all, that question has been settled, by those who have the matter most at heart, and have given it the most intelligent and anxious consideration ; it is, in fact, the foun­dation upon which the whole amiable structure has been erected.