Martha nee Meir Allen (1854-1926) was a Superintendent of the Department of Medical Temperance for the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Her works include Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine (1900). "When the first edition of this book was published in 1900, there were only a few leading physicians either in Europe or America who were ready to condemn the medical use of alcohol. Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson, Sims Woodhead, and a few others in England; Forel, Kassowitz and one or two more on the Continent, and Nathan S. Davis, T. D. Crothers and J. H. Kellogg, in America, were about all that could be quoted largely as opposed to alcoholic liquors as remedies in disease. Whisky was then looked upon as necessary in the treatment of consumption and diphtheria."