The Total Abstinence Question [Zur Abstinenzfrage]. (Wien. med. Presse, No. 14, 1901.) Benedikt

Extract

Dr. Benedikt has been moved to wrath by the recent progress of the theory, especially current in the experimental school of psychologists, that even small doses of alcohol act injuriously on mental function. Anticipating that this heresy would be supported by the Vienna Anti-alcoholist Congress, he has accordingly confided to the columns of the Wiener medizinische Presse, with a perhaps excessive candour, his opinion of the doctrine and its advocates. The latter are, in the professor's view, for the most part a lot of “young-lady-like idealists,” “altruistic hypochrondriacs,” “sophists,” and so on. Dr. Benedikt confines himself to the use of these energetic epithets and to the rhetorical invocation of universal practice in regard of alcohol; he does not meet the theory which he denounces by criticism either of the experiments on which it is based or of the interpretation which has been placed upon these experiments.