The first advantage consists in furnishing to the physician the opportunity for a larger number of cures of drunkenness, which, after having benefited the patients, benefit science, and consequently other inebriates. In fact, I cure the drunkards of my dispensary give times oftener than those in my paying practice, and for the following season: Every three weeks I am given reports of the former, whom I am then able to treat with scientific orderliness and precision and thus increase the change of success. As to the drunkards of my paying clientele, for whom I am consulted at my office, I do not get reports regularly every three weeks, sometimes to lessen the cost of the treatment, but oftener because my patients, so much the more given to reasoning, as they are better educated, reason and ease instead to following with docility the experimental method, as is done by the consultants of my dispensary, under the direction of a physician who is a specials in this branch. But those well to-do patrons (among whom I have numbered some who were very wealthy) really beliefs their experience superior to that of the inebriates in their families, who, being then less regularly tried, are less rapidly, less often, less completely cured, and often, less completely cured, and often die prematurely from the consequences of alcoholism or licentiousness, its usual accompaniment. It is not, therefore, in the clientele of wealthy drunkards that there will be found those fine examples of cures which many benefit science after they shall have benefited the patient first of all.
By contributing to the cure of drunkenness the dispensary has a second advantage that of preventing the drinkers from provoking discord and misery in their families, to whom they will, thence forth bring their earnings, which had before been consumed in alcoholic drinks.
When these dispensaries shall have become numerous, their third advantage will consist in contributing to the diminution of criminality, which is much increased by alcoholism.
The fourth advantage of such a dispensary is, that it will contribute to the more frequent, extensive and striking popularization of the treatment of drunkenness and other passions. While the paying patients, though manifesting their gratefulness for services rendered, will take the greatest care not to tell their friends and acquaintances that such and such members of their families have been cured of drunkenness or other passions, the patrons of the dispensary will show genuine eagerness to make known such cures not only top their relatives and friends, but also to the people with whom they may converse accidentally for the first time. Their accounts, breathing forth, great fullness, sentiment, sometimes enthusiasm, are repeated by these who listen to them and re-echoed indefinitely by each of the persons who heard them. There is thus made a constantly renewed propaganda of the success of the treatment of drunkenness.
There is in a free dispensary this fifth advantage, that its patients, on account of their personal peculiarities of disposition and culture and more disposed to accept a new truth, a progress of any sort, than are the majority of paying patients, although the latter are much more intelligent and cultured. It seems to be so for all truths in general. Before having tested it, one would hardly believe in the practical importance of the following precept of Descartes: Whenever you wish to acquire new knowledge, ears from your mind all former knowledge
A child makes an unconscious application of this precept; he does not need to erase what is in his mind, since as yet his mind is a black. Hence, what constant eagerness he shows in filling it an eagerness which is kept up by an insatiable curiosity that leaders the child to wish to see and especially to try everything. Because of his limited intellectual development he seeks less for intellectual truths than for facts. He has such a desire p assuring himself of the material reality of visible, tangible things, that when, for example, he is shown a statue, he is not satisfied with looking at it, but insists upon touching it and feeling it with his little hands. How eager he is to fill his mind with experimental and observational truths. Therefore, it has been justly said that children look at everything, see everything and wish to try everything.
Next to the child, those who are most like him in their almost insatiable desire to see and try everything are these who have little or no intellectual culture. They are not put to the trouble of erasing their previous knowledge, for their minds are nearly vacant, and they are therefore the more eager, like the child, to fill them with the ideas and facts that are resented to them. On the contrary, the more the minds of people are filled with ideas and facts the less disposed are they to acquire new knowledge, either because they think they have enough, as the result of unconscious pride, or because intellectual weariness, laziness or indifference leads them not to wish to learn anything more. It was probably after having noted this fact that a professor of philosophy in a State university said to me one day: Educated people are the most given to routine. Two hundred years ago Moliere had expressed about the same thought in the following like: A learned fool is more fool than an ignorant fool.
For the reason which I am about to set forth, cultured people often refuse to acquire new knowledge, even when they might test that knowledge by observation and experiment.
Among learned men, and especially among the members of learned bodies, the majority have gone through a course of philosophy; but too often this philosophy has merely run through their minds, and has left behind not even toes elementary principles which are sop useful for the guidance of intellectual life: There are, among others, two kind of truths-the truths of reason, which are discovered or tested by observation and experiment. If a new truth or fact be set forth in the (presence of these learned men the majority immediately want to judge it, to test it by judge, as if it were a truth of reason. They obstinately refuse to rest it, to judge of it, as they should, by means of observation and experiment; and sometimes teachers of philosophy, more theoretical than practical, having sometimes a great deal of learning built lacking judgment, would also test and judge by means of logic truths of fact of which can only be judged by means of observation and experiment.
