The following selection showing points of practice in this hospital is taken from the same report:
“For medicinal purposes, we are as free as possible from all complexity. We use glycerine for making what may be called our tinctures, and in my clinique I am introducing a series of ‘waters’—aqua ferri, aqua chloroformi, aqua opii, aqua quinæ, and so on—to form the menstruums of other active drugs when they are called for. I also follow the plan of having the medicines administered with a free quantity of water, and with as accurate a dosage as can be obtained, for I agree with Mr. Spender’s original proposition that the administration of medicines in comparatively small and frequent doses is more effective and useful than the more common plan of large doses given at long intervals.
“I treat many cases by inhalation, and for this end I use oxygen in a new and, I hope, efficient manner. I make oxygen gas a medium for carrying other volatile substances that admit of being inhaled with it. The mode is very simple. * * * * * In the pneumonic and bronchial cases the treatment has been of the simple and sustaining kind. The medicines that have been given during the acute febrile stages have been chiefly liquor ammoniæ acetatis and carbonate of ammonia in small and frequently repeated doses. The patients have all been well and carefully fed on the milk and middle diet until convalescence was declared. In some of the more extreme instances, where there was fear of collapse from separation of fibrine in the heart or pulmonary artery, ammonia has been given freely according to the method I have for so many years inculcated. I have also in cases of depression under which fibrinous separation is so easily developed, lighted on a mode of administering ammonia which combines feeding with the medicine. I direct that a three or five-grain tabloid of bicarbonate of ammonia shall be dissolved in a cup of coffee or of coffee with milk, and be taken by the patient in that manner. The coffee can be sweetened with sugar if that is desired by the patient, and the ammonia can be so administered without any objectionable taste to the beverage. After what is called the crisis in acute pneumonia, I administer very little medicine of any kind; I trust rather to careful feeding with an occasional alterative or expectorant, as may be required. * * * * * I am satisfied that no aid I could have derived from alcoholic stimulants, as they are called, could have bettered my results. I feel sure any candid medical brother who will have the steady courage to put aside many old and unproven, though much-practiced, methods, based only on unquestioning and unquestioned experience, and to move into these new fields of observation and experience, will, in the end, find no fault with me for leaving a track which, though it be beaten very firmly and be very wide and smooth to traverse, may not, after all, be the surest and soundest path to the golden gate of cure.”
THE FRANCES E. WILLARD NATIONAL TEMPERANCE HOSPITAL.
This hospital is situated at 343-349 South Lincoln Street, Chicago, in a handsome and well-equipped building. It is connected with a medical school. The history of its origin is best told in the words of the woman to whom the conception of such an institution first came, Dr. Mary Weeks Burnett, for several years the physician in charge:—
“In the fall of 1883 there came to a few of us the thought that there was a point of weakness in the temperance pledge. It reads, ‘We promise to abstain from all liquors—as a beverage.’ We had found in many instances in reform work that pledging to abstain from liquor ‘as a beverage,’ and leaving the victim to the unlimited use of it in physicians’ prescriptions, was simply a skirmish with the devil’s outposts, that the conflict, based upon these grounds, was short, and defeat almost sure; and the great fact remained that the innermost recesses of evil force and power were by this pledge still left unassailed. We found that this power of evil had largely entered the homes of our land through the family physicians, and that willingly or not, the physicians were being used to bring in even our innocent children as recruits to this unrighteous warfare.
“Now, how could we hope to eliminate those three little words ‘as a beverage’ from our pledge?
“In some way we must bring about an arrest of thought in the minds of 100,000 men and women physicians whose medical education warranted them in supposing that they knew that of alcohol which justified them in its full and free use in medical practice. Nothing short of a great national object lesson could ever convict and convert this broad constituency through which the power of darkness is doing his deadliest work.
“In January, 1884, four of us met and organized under the name of the National Temperance Hospital. To have our sick properly cared for in our hospital we found that we should be obliged to train our own nurses. The nurse who has always been accustomed to administering alcohol under the physician’s prescription at all times and under all circumstances, and to administering it herself at her own discretion if the physician is not at hand, is a terror to the temperance physician. So we included in our charter a Training School for Nurses. It is now open, and we expect, as the years go by, to send out armed with our training school diplomas, grand, noble women and men thoroughly trained in true temperance methods for relieving the sick.
“Our organization lived on paper, and was sustained in purpose by prayer and planning for two years. In September, 1885, Mr. R. G. Peters, of Manistee, Michigan, signified to us his intention to give $50,000 toward our buildings whenever we had satisfactorily materialized. About the same time a good old gentleman in Michigan placed in his will for us $2,500. The dear man is still living, and we hope will live many years. Even the money when it comes can never be of greater service to us than was the knowledge at that time that the Lord was our leader and was raising up helpers in the work.