THE PSYCHOPATHIC SEQUENCES OF HEREDITARY ALCOHOLIC ENTAILMENT.Read before the Mississippi Valley Medical Association, at Louisville, Ky., October 9th, 1890.

Abstract

Nothing in neuropathology is now plainer than the retrograde heredity of chronic alcoholics. The alcoholic poison interferes with the highly organized physiological movements of the psychical centres, arrests and perverts the complex activities of the cerebral cortex and begins a decadent and perverted neural metamorphosis that goes on from one stage of instability to another, until the final ending of all neural instability is reached (unless fortuitously arrested) in dementia or imbecility and death, when even perverted neural force can no longer be evolved. The evolution of the cerebro-psychical centres thus arrested or perverted, ends in final dissolution and extinction of type. The neuropathic thrall of entailed alcoholism is no new theme to neurologists. It was familiar to Benjamin Rush, and the researches of Morel in the field of neuropathic degeneracy sequent to ancestral alcoholic excess, have been so often affirmed and reaffirmed by credible medical testi mony