Martha Meir Allen

Martha Meir Allen was an American temperance reformer and writer active in the decades around 1900. As superintendent of the Department of Medical Temperance of the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union, she campaigned against the prescription of alcohol by physicians and against alcoholic patent medicines, gathering the opinions of doctors and researchers who shared her views. Her book Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why presented this material to a general audience. Few details of her life beyond this work have been widely recorded, but she was a prominent voice in the medical side of the temperance movement.