Given alcohol 71 18 Given no alcohol 309 15 --- --- 380 33 In May, 1890, Dr. Nathan S. Davis, read a paper before the American Medical Association upon the use of certain drugs in disease. Among the drugs mentioned was alcohol, and comparative death-rates were given in typhoid fever and pneumonia, between Mercy Hospital, Chicago, during a term of years when no alcohol was used in the medical wards, Dr. Davis being in charge of them, and some of the large metropolitan hospitals using alcohol. In Mercy Hospital without alcohol, the death-rate in typhoid fever was only five per cent.; in pneumonia only twelve per cent. "Of 161 cases of typhoid fever treated in Cook County Hospital during 1889, 27 died, or one in six--nearly 17 per cent. "According to the annual report of the Cincinnati Hospital for 1886, 47 cases of typhoid fever were treated during that year, with seven deaths, a mortality rate of 16 per cent. "The Garfield Memorial Hospital, at Washington, reported for the year 1889, 22 cases of typhoid fever, with 5 deaths--or 22 per cent. "In the Pennsylvania Hospital the mortality rate in pneumonia for the years 1884-1886, was 34 per cent. "The mortality of pneumonia in the Massachusetts General Hospital, between the years 1822 and 1889, comprising 1,000 cases, was 25 per cent.; but a gradual increase in mortality had been noted from 10 per cent. in the first decade of the seventy years represented by this report, to 28 per cent. in the last decade. "According to the report of the Supervising Surgeon General of the U.S. Marine Hospital Service for 1888, the number of cases of pneumonia treated between 1880 and 1887 was 1,649, with 311 deaths--nearly 19 per cent. "The Cincinnati Hospital reported for 1886 a mortality rate in pneumonia of 38 per cent. "The mortality rate in the Cook County Hospital, Chicago, for 1889, according to Dr. Heltoin, relating to 80 cases of pneumonia, was 36 per cent." Only a five per cent. death-rate in typhoid fever without alcohol, and from sixteen to twenty-two per cent. with alcohol; only a twelve per cent. death-rate in pneumonia without alcohol, and from 19 to as high as 38 per cent. with alcohol. Such are the comparative death-rates given by Dr. Davis. They should be committed to memory by every opposer of the use of alcohol, as they show clearly that people have many more chances for recovery, other things being equal, in the diseases mentioned, if alcohol is not used than if it is.