Page:Alcohol, a Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine.djvu/263

Rh Cook County Hospital contains in its report for 1897 the following items: Number of patients 19,536; cost of liquors $80.00; per cent, of deaths from all causes, 5.7. The cost of liquors is only .004 for each patient. This shows a decided advance in the disuse of alcohol, when so very little is used in a great hospital, with so large a number of patients.

Dr. A. L. Loomis, in the treatmemt of 600 typhus fever cases on Blackwell's Island in 1864, excluded alcoholics, with the result of reducing the mortality rate to only six per cent, whereas it had previously been twenty-two per cent., in Bellevue Hospital from which the patients had been removed.

In Battle Creek Sanitarium no alcohol is used in any disease, simply because the management believe better results are obtained by the use of other agencies. In the October, (1893) number of the American Medical Temperance Quarterly now Bulletin of the A. M. T. A., Dr. J. H. Kellogg gives statistics of deaths from various diseases in the Battle Creek Sanitarium. The total of these statistics is as follows: la grippe, 827 cases, 4 deaths—or two per cent.; scarlet fever, 83 cases, 2 deaths—less than three per cent.; 333 cases of typhoid fever, 9 deaths—or 2.7 per cent.; 82 cases of pneumonia, 4 deaths—or 4.9 per cent. These exceptional results are not attributed solely to the non-use of alcohol. The nursing and surroundings were of the best. But these results certainly show that the use of