THE TREATMENT OF DISEASE WITHOUT ALCOHOL.
ONE of the most accomplished, as well as most philosophic and most original, of living physicians is Benjamin Ward Richardson. Any expression of opinion or any announcement of practice from his pen must, therefore, be received with the most respectful consideration. He retired from hospital practice in the year 1867, but in the spring of 1892 he received an invitation to become physician to the London Temperance Hospital, which, in his own language, "was so much to my taste, and the mode in which it came to me was so handsomely conceived, that I could not help availing myself of it." Left free to prescribe alcohol medicinally in such cases and at such times as he saw fit, he treated two hundred successive cases, of a wide range of formidable disease, affecting various classes of persons, without the use of alcohol in a single case. Glycerine was employed in the preparation of tinctures, and a series of waters (aqua ferri, aqua chloroformi, aqua opii, etc.) was devised to form the menstrua of other active drugs that might be required. So successful have been the results that it is concluded that they could not have been bettered by any aid that could have been derived from alcoholic stimulants. So says the Philadelphia Medical News. The eighteenth annual report of the hospital shows that 753 patients were treated during the year 1890, of whom 390 were cured, 258 relieved, 60 were unrelieved, and 45, or not quite 6 per cent. (5.93), died. From the opening of the hospital to the end of December 6,896 in-patients have been treated, of whom 3,591 were cured and 428 died, a mortality of 6.2 per cent. The patients were treated in this hospital without the ordinary administration of alcohol.