"The same anaesthetic properties of the alcohol that render the laboring man less _conscious_ of the cold or heat or weariness, also render the sick man less conscious of suffering, either mental or physical, and thereby deceive both him and his physician by the appearance, temporarily, of more comfort. But if administered during the progress of fevers or acute general disease, while it thus quiets the patient's restlessness and lessens his consciousness of suffering, it also directly diminishes the vasomotor and excito-motor nerve forces with slight reduction of temperature, and steadily diminishes both the tissue metabolism and the excretory products, thereby favoring the retention in the system of both the specific causes of disease and the natural excretory materials which should have been eliminated through the skin, lungs, kidneys and other glandular organs. Although the immediate effect of the remedy is thus to give the patient an appearance of more comfort, the continued dulling or anaesthetic effect on the nervous centres, the diminished oxygenation of the blood, and the continued retention of morbitic and excretory products, all serve to protract the disease, increase molecular degeneration, and add to the number of fatal results. "I am well aware that the foregoing views, founded on the results of numerous and varied experimental researches and well-known physiological laws, and corroborated by a wide clinical experience, are in direct conflict with the very generally accepted doctrine that alcohol is a cardiac tonic, capable of increasing the force and efficiency of the circulation, and therefore of great value in the treatment of the lower grades of general fevers. But there have been many generally accepted doctrines in the history of medicine that have been proved fallacious. And the more recent experiments of Professors Martin, Sidney Ringer, and Sainsbury, Reichert, H. C. Wood and others, have clearly demonstrated that the presence of alcohol in the blood as certainly diminishes the sensibility of the vasomotor and cardiac nerves in proportion to its quantity until the heart stops, paralyzed, as that two and two make four. "After an ample clinical field of observation in both hospital and private practice for more than fifty years, and a continuous study of our medical literature, I am prepared to maintain the position that the ratio of mortality from all the acute general diseases has increased in direct proportion to the quantity of alcoholic remedies administered during their treatment. How can we reasonably expect any other result from the use of an agent that so directly and uniformly diminishes the cerebral respiratory, cardiac and metabolic functions of the living human body?"