Last Glow in the Sunset of Medical Use of Whiskey?
Posted: Thu Apr 04, 2013 10:29 am
Here we see a good example of something that within a generation completely changed course:
http://books.google.ca/books?id=inlYAAA ... ky&f=false
It is a medical doctor, with the interesting surname of Octerlony, vaunting the merits of genuine Kentucky sour mash bourbon for clinical use. This was mid-1880's, and surely at the high-water mark of favourable medical opinion in relation to alcohol. I don't recall the exact date, but within 10 or 20 years, alcohol was removed from the U.S. Pharmacopia. The permission to doctors to prescribe small amounts to patients in the Volstead Act era was a last gasp of the time when alcohol was viewed with favour by much of the Fraternity, as Dr. Octolony might have put it.
Now, the good doctor practiced in Louisville, thus perhaps one could consider him more inclined than many physicians of the day to view alcohol positively. But even if so, it is unquestionable that many doctors then felt good bourbon whiskey - whiskey whose only perceived equal was old Cognac brandy - was a boon to health when used sanely to be sure.
(One might note what the Louisville doctor viewed as old: 4-6 years. Those whose purse or detection facilities does not permit the purchase of Pappy 15, 20 or 23 might take some comfort from that).
Even then and even 100 years earlier, the doctors were starting to have doubts though. Benjamin Rush and his work in the 1770's is perhaps the first notable example of an American physician raising alarms about spirits consumption. Dr. Octolony might have retorted that sour mash bourbon didn't exist then.
At any rate, after about 1900 drinking was rarely to my knowledge boosted by the docs. There is one book, by a Dr. Maurice Chayfetz I think it was, written after WW II which defended the sane and intelligent use of alcohol by the population. But apart from that, the kind of quotation above (to my knowledge) belongs essentially to history.
Gary
http://books.google.ca/books?id=inlYAAA ... ky&f=false
It is a medical doctor, with the interesting surname of Octerlony, vaunting the merits of genuine Kentucky sour mash bourbon for clinical use. This was mid-1880's, and surely at the high-water mark of favourable medical opinion in relation to alcohol. I don't recall the exact date, but within 10 or 20 years, alcohol was removed from the U.S. Pharmacopia. The permission to doctors to prescribe small amounts to patients in the Volstead Act era was a last gasp of the time when alcohol was viewed with favour by much of the Fraternity, as Dr. Octolony might have put it.
Now, the good doctor practiced in Louisville, thus perhaps one could consider him more inclined than many physicians of the day to view alcohol positively. But even if so, it is unquestionable that many doctors then felt good bourbon whiskey - whiskey whose only perceived equal was old Cognac brandy - was a boon to health when used sanely to be sure.
(One might note what the Louisville doctor viewed as old: 4-6 years. Those whose purse or detection facilities does not permit the purchase of Pappy 15, 20 or 23 might take some comfort from that).
Even then and even 100 years earlier, the doctors were starting to have doubts though. Benjamin Rush and his work in the 1770's is perhaps the first notable example of an American physician raising alarms about spirits consumption. Dr. Octolony might have retorted that sour mash bourbon didn't exist then.
At any rate, after about 1900 drinking was rarely to my knowledge boosted by the docs. There is one book, by a Dr. Maurice Chayfetz I think it was, written after WW II which defended the sane and intelligent use of alcohol by the population. But apart from that, the kind of quotation above (to my knowledge) belongs essentially to history.
Gary