Medicine: 5c Whiskey

The professor of clinical medicine at the University of Kansas, a Dry State’s main university, is Dr. Logan Clendening. Dr. Clendening is also a fellow of the American College of Physicians and a writer on medicine for newspapers. These facts gave piquancy and currency to his paraphrase last week of the late genial

Vice President Thomas Marshall’s mot: “What this country needs is a good 5¢ cigar.” Said Professor Clendening, visiting in Manhattan: “What this country needs is a good 5¢ drink of whiskey.”

U. S. doctors, as a body, want modification of the Volstead Act (TIME, Oct. 12), chiefly because they want no Governmental restrictions on their professional conduct. They disagree radically, however, on the merits of alcohol as a drug or tonic. Few alcohol proponents are as “sick and tired of all the bunk” on the subject as is Professor Clendening who Wants to be quoted “freely as saying that the best inherent qualities in any alcoholic drink are in whiskey.”

According to him: “Whiskey stimulates the flow of gastric juices, it takes the edge off mental worries; it is a panacea which, if used in moderation, the human race cannot well get on without. It is far more efficacious than wine or beer; and, what’s more, there’s no use talking about wine or beer as far as this country is concerned. The Anglo-Saxon race is not a wine-drinking race and never will be. Legalize wine and beer and you will have a nation of staggering dyspeptics, all afflicted with cirrhosis of the liver. Legalize whiskey, make it easy to obtain, and you will have a temperate nation and a civilized one. That may sound like plain speaking, but it’s the truth.” Before the War and Prohibition, only the cheapest and rawest of whiskey could be bought for a nickel a drink. It was freshly distilled, acrid grain alcohol, diluted with water and colored with caramel. It contained poisonous fusel oils, seared the stomach, appealed only to the poorest of dipsomaniacs.