The speaker added, addressing him: "Your professional experience will corroborate this, Dr.Angier." "Corroborate what ?" he asked, with a slight appearance of evasion in his manner.
"We were speaking of the effects of intemperance on the more cultivated and refined classes, and I said that it mattered little as to the social condition; the hurt of drink was the same and the disturbance of normal conditions as great in one class of society as in another, that a confirmed inebriate, when under the influence of intoxicants, lost all idea of respectability or moral responsibility, and would act out his insane passion, whether he were a lawyer, an army officer or a hod-carrier.

In other words, that social position gave the wife of an inebriate no immunity from personal violence when alone with her drunken husband." Dr.Angier did not reply, but his face became thoughtful.
"Have you given much attention to the pathology of drunkenness ?" asked one of the gentlemen.
"Some; not a great deal.

The subject is one of the most perplexing and difficult we have to deal with." "You class intemperance with diseases, do you not ?" "Yes; certain forms of it.

It may be hereditary or acquired like any other disease.

One man may have a pulmonary, another a bilious and another a dypso-maniac diathesis, and an exposure to exciting causes in one case is as fatal to health as in the other.