Word: chien
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...dawn it was the heart of Paris as well as the belly, as farmers trundled in with their bounty, chefs and grocers arrived to buy it, and prostitutes and pickpockets merged for different kinds of commerce. Such restaurants as Au Pied de Cochon, Le Pere Tranquille and Au Chien Qui Fume lured socialites in white ties as well as butchers in blood-spattered white smocks, often as the sun was rising. Left Bank intellectuals, statesmen, artists and American expatriates like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald were all habitues of Les Halles' all-night eating places...
...common knowledge that alcohol, in moderation, has therapeutic effects-as a releaser of emotional tensions, for instance, and as a mild sedative. Drink also serves society through the simple but significant camaraderie of the cup. In a recent experiment, Dr. Ching-piao Chien, a senior psychiatrist at Boston State Hospital, tested this function of alcohol on geriatric patients. Chien staged his study in the hospital sunroom, which had been converted for the experiment into a pub. His subjects were 40 male inmates (average age 73) suffering from depression or mental deterioration stemming from senility...
Suds and Punch. At random, Chien split his subjects into four groups of ten each. Three groups spent an hour each weekday afternoon for nine weeks in the makeshift tavern. The members of one group were given 12 ounces of beer each; those of the second, a glass of nonalcoholic fruit punch; the third, fruit punch containing a dose of thioridazine, a psychotropic (mind-affecting) drug for the treatment of senility. Members of the fourth group, which was established as a control, stayed in the ward and got their usual dose of thioridazine straight...
...Chien suspected, the most efficacious therapeutic agent turned out to be the beer, along with the social atmosphere of the pub and the salutary effect of simply being allowed to drink. Over the course of the experiment, the beer group mingled most companionably in the pub's easy ambience and rarely left before their allotted hour was up. Where 21.3% of the punch drinkers either departed early or failed to show up at all, only 5% of the beer drinkers did. Moreover, not one of them refused his daily glass, while punch drinkers did so 22% of the time...
Psychiatrist Chien wisely refrains from overinterpreting the result of his experiment. Indeed, he allows for the possibility that because his subjects were predominantly Irish-with a legendary thirst for suds-the salubrious effect of the beer therapy might have been enhanced a certain amount. But he found that if old men, although defined as mentally ill, are given the chance to play a normal social role, they will eagerly respond, and symptoms of senility and mental illness are diminished...