"To alleviate, and, if possible, cure disease, is the design of all hospital treatment. In our hospital we seek to gain this result by means which the highest science of the day approves, and in addition to this we have especially at heart the advancement of the temperance reform. There are, we believe, thousands of temperance adherents, who do not yet fully apprehend the importance of this hospital to the permanent extension and progress of temperance principles. Although prohibition as a _principle_ has been accepted by many, yet in its _practical application_ in the home in serious illness, it is still feared by the immense majority of even our strongest prohibitionists. We are organized upon the basis _no alcohol in medicine_, and we are preparing to demonstrate fully and scientifically, so he who runs may read, that as in health, so in disease and accident, alcohol in any form works to the hindrance and injury of the vital forces, and prevents the establishment and advancement of health processes in the system." At the opening of the hospital, May 4, 1886, Miss Frances E. Willard, the president of the National W. C. T. U., gave the following address: "Nothing is changeless except change. The conservatives of one epoch are the madmen of the next, even as the radicals of to-day would have been the lunatics of yesterday. To prove this, just imagine the founders of this hospital declaring to my great-grandfather that because he had taken a cold was no reason why he should take a toddy; and _per contra_, imagine my great-grandfather's doctor marching into our presence here and now, with saddle-bags on arm, and after treating us each to a glass of grog for our stomach's sake, giving us a scientific disquisition on the sovereign virtues of the blue pill, and informing us that bleeding, cupping and starvation were the surest methods of cure! "That the story of Evolution is true I am by no means certain, but that 'We, Us, and Company,' are 'evoluting' with electric speed ourselves it is useless to deny. This very hospital is the latest mile-stone on the highway of progress in the American temperance reform. The conditions that have made its existence possible have developed in this country within about twelve years. "Public opinion, that mightiest of magicians, has within that time been educated up to this level and has said in its omnipotence: 'Hospital, be!' and, behold, the hospital _is_. "When I joined the ranks of temperance workers in 1874, a thought so adventurous as that alcoholics in relation to medicine were a curse and not a blessing had never lodged within my cranium. But, as in duty bound, I studied the subject from the practical, which is the nineteenth century standpoint.