The result is to be found in the brief declaration made by the Section on Medicine, of the INTERNATIONAL MEDICAL CONGRESS, which met in Philadelphia in 1876.

This body was composed of about six hundred delegates, from Europe and America, among them, some of the ablest men in the profession.

Realizing the importance of some expression in relation to the use of alcohol, medical and otherwise, from this Congress, the National Temperance Society laid before it, through its President, W.E.Dodge, and Secretary, J.N.Stearns, the following memorial: "The National Temperance Society sends greeting, and respectfully invites from your distinguished body a public declaration to the effect that alcohol should be classed with other powerful drugs; that, when, prescribed medicinally, it should be with conscientious caution and a sense of grave responsibility; that it is in no sense food to the human system; that its improper use is productive of a large amount of physical disease, tending to deteriorate the human race; and to recommend, as representatives of enlightened science, to your several nationalities, total abstinence from alcoholic beverages." In response to this memorial, the president of the society received from J.Ewing Mears, M.D., Secretary of the Section on Medicine, International Congress, the following official letter, under date of September 9th, 1876: "DEAR SIR: I am instructed by the Section on Medicine, International Medical Congress, of 1876, to transmit to you, as the action of the Section, the following conclusions adopted by it with regard to the use of alcohol in medicine, the same being in reply to the communication sent by the National Temperance Society.
"1.

Alcohol is not shown to have a definite food value by any of the usual methods of chemical analysis or physiological investigation.
"2.

Its use as a medicine is chiefly that of a cardiac stimulant, and often admits of substitution.
"3.