Alcohol Plus Suggestion.--Alcohol has been employed in medicine with the persuasion that it is a remedy for many states of exhaustion, though we have gradually gotten away from its use to a great extent, because we realize that subsequent physical ill consequences outweigh, in most cases, the physical good it may do. Its use was undoubtedly due to the confidence of physicians communicated to patients, and the sense of good feeling which it gives and which proves a further strong suggestion to the patient. This sense of well-being is illusory, for it is sure to be followed by a longer period of dejection, which more than counteracts it unless the dose of alcohol can be maintained for some time. A generation ago few physicians would have cared to treat exhausting diseases, the continued fevers for instance, without liberal doses of alcohol. Practically the only treatment for pyemia and septicemia on which any stress was laid, and in which there was any general confidence, was the administration of alcohol in large quantities. In the septicemia consequent upon puerperal infection it was the common teaching to give alcohol by the tablespoonful or more every hour, or oftener, until its effects began to be noticed, and ordinarily large quantities were required, so that sometimes nearly a quart was taken in the twenty-four hours. Undoubtedly these septic conditions were accompanied by great mental prostration, and this was emphasized by the knowledge that they are often fatal. So patients were usually depressed into a state of mind in which their resistive vitality was much lowered. Alcohol, then, by producing a sense of well-being as well as by stimulating hope in other ways and suggesting possibilities of recovery, undoubtedly exerted a powerful and favorable influence on the mind. Its use in these cases nearly always did good, in spite of its inevitable depressive reaction, for the course of these infections was rapid and the dosage of alcohol could be maintained until there was a change for the better or the fatal termination was in sight. Alcohol was frequently used in many other conditions of a similar nature, and above all in the septic conditions so common in hospitals before the days of antisepsis and asepsis. When it is recalled that amputations yielded a mortality from sepsis of at least one in four, the extensive use of alcohol in hospital practice two generations ago will be readily understood. We have changed that, however, and Sir Frederick Treves, at a meeting of the British Medical Association at Toronto, five years ago, called particular attention to the statistics of the use of alcohol in British hospitals. During the last forty years milk and alcohol have exactly changed places in the London hospitals. Between 1860 and 1870 about four times as much was spent for alcohol as for milk in these hospitals; during the last decade about four times as much was spent for milk as for alcohol.