[19] Dr Crothers notes in the first Norman Kerr lecture, "As a surgeon on shipboard he was known as a temperance doctor, and while not obtrusive or dogmatic in his views, he discouraged the use of spirits as a beverage.

In a letter to the local paper he wrote "The Sanitary authority, typhus being at once the most contagious and the most preventable of diseases, ought to have suppressed the epidemic more than a month ago, and thus saved several lives.

Had I not stepped in, at some detriment to health and private practice (keeping up only with the aid of professional assistance, constant Turkish baths, extra diet, and the non-use of stimulants) and discharged the duty the Vestry neglected, the cases would have numbered hundreds, and the deaths at least twenties.

Dr Kerr also believed that "smoke being retained in the mouth has … a kind of disinfecting filter through which the germs have to pass, and some of them are certainly destroyed, or at least deprived of their vitality".

On broad, general grounds, however, he was decidedly of opinion that tobacco smoking, other things being equal, did give anyone exposed to infection a considerable amount of immunity.

A free entertainment, comprising songs, choruses, recitations, and addresses, was given in Perseverance Hall, Charles street, Lisson Grove, on Thursday evening, by J.M.R.

Dr. Norman Kerr, who occupied the chair, said that to escape an attack of the recent fashionable complaint of the neighbourhood (laughter) he had been ordered away at an hour's notice, and it was not till he got to France that the breezes of the English Channel had blown away all the threatening and suspicious symptoms.

But he was delighted at again finding himself in Charles-street, where he had spent so much of his time of late (laughter); for he found the atmosphere greatly improved by the energetic and thoroughgoing exertions of the Sanitary Authority and their staff (hear).

He was thankful to find that during his absence the Vestry of Marylebone had resolved to institute a searching inquiry into the sanitary state of the parish and he had great hope that such measures would be adopted as would prevent any alarming epidemics for the future, and thus bring back to the neighbourhood the people and the trade that had been of late kept away by fear of contagion.

Yet no notice was taken of this deadly plague which, to his personal knowledge, had killed many of the inhabitants, and which still held down as many innocent helpless little children in the slough of starvation and misery.

[35] The Society drafted a bill to provide for one year detention of voluntary and criminal drunkards, with magistrates having the power to commit frequent offenders.

[39][40] In 1884 he chaired the informal meeting to celebrate Edward Payson Weston's temperance walk of 5000 miles in 100 days, excluding Sundays, at the Royal Victoria Coffee Hall, Lambeth.

[46] A report of one of his lectures on the subject at the Walmer Castle Coffee Tavern recorded that In 1884, in response to the inadequacy of the Habitual Drunkards Act of 1879, he founded the Society for the Study and Cure of Inebriety and was the first president.

We may define it as a diseased state of the brain and nerve centres, characterised by an irresistible impulse to indulge in intoxicating liquors or other narcotics for the relief which these afford, at any peril.

This ungovernable, uncontrollable, over-powering impulse may hurry on the diseased dipsomaniac to his destruction, even when he has no relish for the toxic agent, but on the contrary loathes and detests it.

In this class the bodily disease is dealt with by appropriate medical and hygienic treatment directed to the cure or alleviation of the particular state of each patient, and to building up healthy brain and nerve tissue.

Indeed, considerable emphasis is laid on the moral and religious influences, because of their elevating and purifying effect on the depravity of the inebriates in whom, in the diseased state, selfishness, lying, and deceit are generally met with.

But in America, and in some of our colonies, patients can enter on a simple agreement, and once they are in the home the conductor has the power to detain them, abuses being guarded against by frequent inspection.

– Because of a condition of pathological unrest, or a diseased and overpowering mental and physical uneasiness which is impossible to describe, but which demands relief even at the price of adding to the trouble.

Dr. Norman Kerr, who, together with Dr. B. W. Richardson, Is one of the honorary consulting physicians to the Dalrymple Hone at Rickmansworth, then permitted the writer to visit that establishment, which he found to be a country mansion called "The Cedars," standing on a terrace 30 ft. above the river Colne, which flows through five acres of charming grounds belonging to the place.

"The conclusions and recommendations of that committee have been for some considerable time under my attention, and it is my hope that in the next session of Parliament we shall introduce a Bill which will seek to give effect to the more important of them.

A large proportion of those cases would be cured, and these police court repeaters would be restored to industrious portion of the population, with a corresponding increase in national wealth."

Alluding to the difficulties of such legislation, the doctor said, "In reply to a deputation from the Society for the Study of Inebriety, of which I am president, and the British Medical Association, The Home Secretary promised to bring in a bill dealing with the criminal habitual drunkards.

Chlorodyne is expensive, and you may wonder how working men's wives can afford to take it in any quantities, but I have known cases where they have sold the furniture out of their houses and pawned all they could to obtain their doses.

We have more highly-strung temperaments, we are more susceptible to pain and emotion, and in this country the vast majority of people who once take to morphine are doomed men, and go to the devil."

The Injection can be so easily made that victims will take a drug while sitting talking in a drawing-room with friends without those by them noticing anything, save that they suddenly become brighter and more lively."

[64][65][66] He provided a "Penny Supper" consisting of a vegetable stew for about 250 poor people living about Lisson Grove at the Perseverance Temperance Hall, to show "inexpensive and wholesome" food.

[71] Representing the Church Sanitary Association as vice-chairman he was part of a deputation asking the County Council to adopt a system of properly supervised public abattoirs "for the good in every way, as well for the cause of kindness to animals as for that of sanitation".

[72][73] By 1871 he was living at Markyate Street, Bedfordshire (now Hertfordshire), and married Eleanor Georgina Gibson (born 1850, Ballinderry, Ireland) at St Peter's, South Kensington;[76] they had a son and four daughters.

[2] After the death of his wife in 1892 he was married for a second time in 1894 at Booterstown to Edith Jane Henderson (1851 - 1922), who was vice president of the Women's Total Abstinence Union from 1898 until 1917.