155 line would be extinguished in a later generation (Campos Marín, Alcoholismo 126). The anti-alcoholism campaign in Spain produced, ―una enorme declaración de buenas intenciones‖ but, ―de hecho, las sociedades de temperancia, los asilos para bebedores o las legislaciones antialcohólicas no tuvieron el éxito o la profusión que se observa en otros paìses‖ (Campos Marìn, Alcoholismo 127). Effectively, nothing was done and despite the efforts of higienistas to have alcoholics separated from the mad in special recovery asilos, their attempts foundered on the opposition of the liquor industry, the more pressing demands of other social degenerative conditions, above all tuberculosis, and ingrained social customs of alcohol consumption (Campos Marín, Alcoholismo 128). Others adopted a laissez-faire attitude based on the belief, derived from Morel, that the problem was auto-regulating and self-limiting in that families of degenerate alcoholics could be expected to become extinct by the fourth generation (Campos Marín, Alcoholismo 65). There was agreement among experts in both France and Spain, that while consumption of traditional wines and beers was, on the whole, healthful, the arrival of cheap spirits as a result of the growth of industrial scale distillation was an unmitigated disaster and was closely related to the increase of public inebriation seen in cities.
c) Prostitution and Venereal Disease
The links between alcohol, sex and sexual transgression are as old as history and it has been said that, ―no realm of human experience is as closely tied to the concept of degeneration as that of sexuality‖ (Sander Gilman, Difference 191). From the oft-published text of Tissot on onanism (Perdiguero and González 143 ff.), to Morel‘s condemnations of l’immoralité and l’ivrognerie (Morel, Traité 57-8, 311, 376-