As Good As Dead

In 1883, Doctor T.S. Clouston lectured at the University of Edinburgh on The Effects of the Excessive Use of Alcohol On the Mental Functions of the Brain:

“We know as a statistical fact that from fifteen to twenty per cent. of the actual insanity of the country is produced by the excessive use of alcohol. In that case, as we have about one person to every three hundred in the population insane, it follows that one person in every two thousand of our people, counting men, women, and children, become insane, and deprived of their reason, of their power of action, of their power of enjoyment, and of their personal liberty from this cause. This makes about 17,500 persons at any given time in the British Empire who are so incapacitated by reason of mental alienation, produced through the excessive and continuous use of alcohol. These people are as good as dead while they are insane; they do no work for the world or in the world, and all that makes life worth having for them, they are deprived of …”

It is unclear whether Doctor Clouston’s figures refer to British people in the British Empire or about one quarter of the world’s population. Either way, the numbers hardly seem alarming, unless, as good as dead anyway, he was proposing to round them up ... Then again, the numbers cited were only “those so well known as to be available for statistics,” which is to say “registered persons who have been so ill as to have been sent to asylums through the excessive use of alcohol.”

The sun never set on the British Empire. Apparently the bars never closed either.