The Republican. [volume] (Oakland, Md.) 1877-current, 1889-06-22
NON-ALcoHoLIC MEDICATION.
That Temperance Hospitals Have Taught
Concerning the Cure of Disease.

Temperance hospitals taught concern
cohol? and the editor OF the Advance
desires me to answer.
The London Temperance Hospital
began this teaching fourteen years
ago. 1t is in charge of DR.. James
Edmunds, careful, conservative
physician. 1t opened with no flourish
of trumpets nor any assertions as to
what it would do. II simply pro-
posed not to use alcohol as a remedy,
unless deemed necessary because all
other remedies failed. 1t is situated
in the heart of London, and takes all
cases that naturally come to a great
city hospital, including the accident
and emergency cases for which the
use of alcohol is usually deemed
necessary. During those fourteen
years it has received and treated over
10000 cases. In only five OF them
have alcoholics been used, and in
these instances results proved no
more successful than where the reme-
dies ordinarily employed in the
hospital were used. The rate of
mortality was only five and eight
tenths per cent, which is four and
five-tenths per cent lower than in any
other London hospital taking the
same class of patients. Especial at
tention has been paid to typhoid fever
cases, as the conviction is very deep
seated that these must have brandy,
whisky or other alcoholics. The
typhoid wards quite unexpectedly
showed results strongly supporting
the theory of non-alcoholic medical
ton, the ratio of recoveries as COM
pared with those in hospitals where
alcoholics are used being even greater
than was shown in the general aver
age.
Another good result is noted: OF
the 10000 patients treated in the
London Temperance Hospital, more
than 10000 were more or less
addicted to the use of strong drink.
While in the hospital they were free
from it entirely; the taste for it was
not kept alive and pampered as in al
coholic medication, by daily or hourly
doses of liquor; thus the system was
purged of the poison. This, added to
their appreciation of the good effects
of non-alcoholic medication, led many
to become total abstainers.
The records of this hospital also tes-
tify to the fact that the use of liquor
subtracts from the life force and rem
ders the patient more liable to succumb
to disease. In fatal cases there were
fully twenty per cent. more deaths
among the non-abstainers than among
teetotale!s. Every visitation of the
cholera, the yellow fever or of any
other great plague, demonstrates the
same fact.
The National Temperance Hospital
at Chicago has otyet been established
long enough to teach with the same
authority, but its teachings are in the
same direction. Especially has ii
proved that in cases of collapse prep
arations of ammonia can be used with
much better effect than alcoholics, re-
suits being secured more quickly and
certainly. and the after effects being
much better, there being no danger
Gus reaction, as is often the case when
resort has been had to alcohol, the
paralyzer. For the world is coming
to understand that alcohol is always
and everywhere depressant, and
never stimulant, as it has so long
claimed to be.
! What substitutes can be used in its
place? is asked. For fainting and
shock, ten drops of aqua ammonia we'll
diluted in water; this may be repeated
in ten minutes. if necessary. For ex-
haustion, hot milk, tea, coffee or soup
will give better results than alcohol.
For collapse, ten drops of aqua am
monia in hot milk, given in small
quantities every few minutes will
prove efficacious. Florence Nightin-
gale, in her Notes on Nursing, recon-
mends hot tea very strongly. She
says that in the Crimean hospitals she
directed the nurses to give cup of
hot tea to the weakest patients about
three o'clock in the morning. the time
when vital forces run lowest and more
patients die than at any other hour of
the twenty-four. This she feels as
sured, tided many a patient over the
turning-point, who without it would
have died.
DR.. Nathan S. Davis. the Nestor OF
American physicians, testifies that for
over thirty years he has tested the
efficacy of non-alcoholic medication.
and has found no case OF disease and
no emergency arising from accident
that he could not treat more success
fully without any form of fermented
or distilled liquor than with it. In
the journal o. the American Medical
Association, December 81, 1887, he
says:
in typhoid fever, with iodine as general
alterant and antiseptic to counterfeit the molec-
ular degeneration in the tissues and the
blood, and the choice Of cardiac and vaso-
motor tonics from the class of remedies rep
resented by coffee, tea, strychnia, carbonate
ammonia, ETC., according to the special symp-
toms of each case, and vigilant attention to
the local complications that are, in many
cases, more dangerous to the patient than the