But it is not my purpose to discuss the effect of alcohol in any way except as it pertains to the human body, nor to go into the reasons why men so poison their bodies as to bring about these deleterious results. The deterioration that we have been considering, when occurring in the mind, would naturally cause one to infer that insanity must also be common in those who are addicted to alcohol, and such is indeed the case. In New York State alone I believe it can be safely said that fully ten per cent. of the women and thirty per cent. of the men confined in the state asylums are there through forms of insanity caused by alcohol. It will not profit us to go into the various forms of alcoholic insanity, but when we realize that one-third of the men in the insane asylums to-day in New York are there because of excessive indulgence in alcohol, and also that the State spends annually over six million dollars to care for them, we realize both the terrible ravages that alcoholic poison has made on the mentality of men and the enormous cost that it entails upon the community. As to the alcohol circulating in the blood, there is an endeavor naturally to get rid of it as with all poisons, and the kidneys in this endeavor show the same processes that are elsewhere seen, of destruction of the specific cells, congestion, and increased connective tissue growth. Whether it is that these cells are destroyed in an endeavor to eliminate various substances for which they are not fitted and break down under the strain, or whether they are directly poisoned by the alcohol itself, the resultant factors are those best understood in the lay mind as acute and chronic Bright's disease. Whether or not alcohol produces these various processes in the kidneys which result in these diseased conditions, there is no question but that certain of these diseased conditions appear more frequently in alcoholics than in others. Besides the destructive processes about which we have been speaking in the various viscera, there are certain results of alcohol that may be said to affect the general condition of the individual. By this I mean the general resistance to bacterial infection, the resistance to injury to the body, and the ability to repair such injuries. Alcohol diminishes the power of the body to resist bacterial infection. The alcoholic is more prone to acquire bacterial diseases, and when these are acquired he is infinitely less able to resist them. In Bellevue Hospital in 1904 there were 1,001 patients with lobar pneumonia. Of these, 667 gave a history of alcoholism; 334 were non-alcoholics, which means that there were twice as many alcoholics suffering from this disease as non-alcoholics. Among the alcoholics the mortality was fifty per cent., and among the non-alcoholics, 23.9 per cent. Here again the mortality among the alcoholics was more than double that which prevailed among those who had not taken this narcotic. The same is true of other infectious diseases.