Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why: What Medical Writers SayAllen, Martha Meir
Science
Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why: What Medical Writers Say
Allen, Martha Meir
Alcohol -- Physiological effect; Temperance
It is worthy of mention in this connection that Cook County Hospital
contains in its report for 1897 the following items: Number of patients
19,536; cost of liquors $80.00; per cent. of deaths from all causes,
5.7. The cost of liquors is only .004 for each patient. This shows a
decided advance in the disuse of alcohol, when so very little is used in
a great hospital, with so large a number of patients.
Dr. A. L. Loomis, in the treatment of 600 typhus fever cases on
Blackwell's Island in 1864, excluded alcoholics, with the result of
reducing the mortality rate to only six per cent. whereas it had
previously been twenty-two per cent., in Bellevue Hospital from which
the patients had been removed.
In Battle Creek Sanitarium no alcohol is used in any disease, simply
because the management believe better results are obtained by the use of
other agencies. In the October, (1893) number of the _American Medical
Temperance Quarterly_ now _Bulletin of the A. M. T. A._, Dr. J. H.
Kellogg gives statistics of deaths from various diseases in the Battle
Creek Sanitarium. The total of these statistics is as follows: la
grippe, 827 cases, 4 deaths--or two per cent.; scarlet fever, 83 cases,
2 deaths--less than three per cent.; 333 cases of typhoid fever, 9
deaths--or 2.7 per cent.; 82 cases of pneumonia, 4 deaths--or 4.9 per
cent. These exceptional results are not attributed solely to the non-use
of alcohol. The nursing and surroundings were of the best. But these
results certainly show that the use of alcohol as a remedy in acute
diseases is not necessary, and that patients have a much better chance
for life, other things being equal, where alcohol is not used than where
it is.
Dr. Kellogg says of the surgical cases:--
"In a hospital of 100 beds, connected with the institution, more
than 3,000 surgical cases have been treated, to whom alcohol has
never been administered except in connection with chloroform
anaesthesia; my uniform custom being to administer an ounce of
brandy or whisky five minutes before beginning the
administration of the anaesthetic, when chloroform is used.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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