Many friends of alcoholic subjects and many physicians in private practice have believed that they were doing the alcoholic a great service when they put him where he could not get alcohol, and helped him over the first acute stages of the period of deprivation by the administration of bromide and other sedatives. This usually means delirium first and then a "wet brain"; if the patient survives this, his next development is more than likely to be prolonged psychosis, or, in the end, permanent insanity. It is because of this that I consider the chronic alcoholic more clearly entitled to prompt and intelligent medical treatment than most other sick persons. With the alcoholic, as with the drug-taker, the first thing to be accomplished is the unpoisoning of the body. In order to accomplish this, it is first necessary to keep up the alcoholic medication, with ample sedatives, using great care lest the patient drift into that extreme nervous condition which leads to delirium. If delirium does occur, nothing but sleep can bring about an improvement in the patient's condition. This is the point of development at which physicians not properly informed in regard to such cases are likely to employ large quantities of hypnotics, and frequently this course is followed until the patient is finally "knocked out." In many instances an accumulation of hypnotics in the systems of persons thus under treatment has proved fatal. I am rather proud of my ability to state that from delirium tremens I have never lost a single case. NECESSITY OF CLASSIFICATION OF ALCOHOLICS The records show that to-day about forty per cent. of the insane in the asylums of New York State have a definite alcoholic history. In this condition lies one of the greatest opportunities ever offered to the medical profession. Even now a proper classification of the patients thus immured, and their appropriate treatment, would in many instances result in the return to the normal of those affected; proper classification and treatment at the time when the symptoms of mental disorder first appeared would have resulted in the salvation of innumerable cases. As a matter of fact, I earnestly believe that if this course was followed, the number of supposedly permanent cases of insanity arising from alcoholic and drug addictions might be decreased by seventy-five per cent.