Page:Alcohol, a Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine.djvu/260

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252
ALCOHOL AS A MEDICINE.

sustains the conviction that no substitute has been found for them."

In a late number of the Temperance Record, Dr. Smith gives a different view of the experience of English physicians:—

"When Bentley Todd was at King's College, and leading his profession, brandy was the rule in febrile cases. Then the mortality varied from twenty-five to thirty-five per cent. That the treatment was as fatal as the disease, experience demonstrates:—

"1. Professor W. T. Gairdner, of Glasgow, writing to the Lancet (1864), gave his experience as follows :—

Fever cases treated. Average of wine and spirits. Mortality.
1,829 34 oz. to each 17.69 per cent.
595 2½ oz. to each 11.93 per cent.
212 none 1 death only.
(young lives)

"These were mostly typhus cases, but the rationale, so far as alcohol is concerned, is the same as in typhoid.

"2. At the British Medical Association in 1879, Professor H. MacNaughton Jones gave particulars of 340 cases of typhus, typhoid and simple fever. I append a summary :—

Cases. Deaths. Mortality per cent
Given brandy 58 19 32.7
Given claret 51 2 3.8
Given no alcohol 231 4 1.7

"3. Dr. J. C. Pearson writes to the Lancet (Dec. 5 and 26, 1891), giving his experience of typhoid. He had treated several hundreds of cases without a single death, and never prescribed stimulants in any shape or form in the disease.

"4. Dr. Knox Bond writes to the Lancet (Nov. 25, 1893), giving his experience of typhoid at the Liverpool Fever Hospital. He says : 'As a resident for some years in the fever hospitals,