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“...consumption of opium within the smallest practical limits ?” Sir J. Pease also puts other queries of a similar nature. The answers are, that the British Government has been weak enough to apply pressure to the Government of India, in deference to the clamour, sensational agitation, and fallacies, so persistently urged by the small section of the people in this country composing the Anti-Opium Society, who have not hesitated to use the religious element as a lever.
I am, Sir, yours faithfully, WILLIAM MOORE, Surgeon-General.
15 Portland Place, Dec. 16.
TO THE EDITOR OF “THE TIMES.”
Sir,—As one cognizant of the facts concerning the petition of 49 medical men in Bombay deploring the use of opium by natives of India, which is alluded to in a telegram published by you, and dated Calcutta, December 3rd, I wish to deny that the petition was in any sense a fraud.
In April, 1891, a large meeting was held in the Framji Cowasji Hall, Bombay, to support Sir Joseph Pease’s motion on the opium question. The Bishop...”
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“...clad and protected, but I was travelling in a palki on duty through a swamp, and I felt I had swallowed some poisonous substance, or gas, just as I once did in Greenwich from a drain, and though the former resulted in an attack of malarial fever, and the latter in a sharp attack of diarrhoea, yet there was no chill in either case, because I was in a healthy glow from warm clothing.
This sickness and retching symptom of malarial fever in the swamps of Bengal, may perhaps be unknown to Sir William Moore in his practice in Rajpootana and Central India, as the physical conditions of Central India, and the swamps of Bengal are as different as it is possible to be—and the vicissitudes of temperature must consequently be very different in the case of the dry heat of Central India, and the most pestilential, at times almost foetid air of the swamps, and soonderbunds of Bengal.
Now, how about this chill theory, and its prevention or prophylaxis due to the Indian’s “ carelessness in not using extra garments”...”
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“...i6
used, as it is by those engaged in horse-breeding operations in various districts in Northern India.
E. Sensuous in debauchery.—Sir William Moore, in the abstract of the paper which he read at the Imperial Institute on the 23rd Nov., 1893 “ On Opium,” is made to state the following :— “ It was said that using opium was wicked and immoral, and destructive of health. He had often smoked opium, and really did not see where the wickedness and immorality came in.” Surely Sir William must have forgotten what he said, at the discussion which followed my paper on “ Opium from a Public Health Point of View,” at the meeting of the British Medical Association at Bournemouth in 1891, when, alluding to one of the charges brought against opium, viz., that the opium habit in excess led to impotence, he said, so far from this being the case, all the first class opium smoking saloons in Bombay, had a brothel attached to them ! Exactly so, and it is here the unutterable debauchery takes place among the...”
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