Medicine: Delirium Tremens

Clamoring hideously, endlessly gibbering in the psychopathic wards of municipal hospitals, in the padded cells of county jails, victims of delirium tremens every day pursue their terrible hallucinations. Rats scramble over the bodies of their imagination. Snakes writhe around their necks. With tensely stretched fingers the maddened, sweating sots try to climb up the bending walls of curvetting rooms, after bats, buzzards, flitting elephants. Lizards scurry out of their roaring ears. And tales of forgotten sins flip off their white-furred, tremulous tongues.

Last week, to the 26 methods of treating D. T.’s developed by U. S., English, French, German and Swiss specialists, the American Medical Association’s Journal added another cure, which the sponsors, Drs. Philip Edward Piker of Cincinnati and Jess Victor Cohn of Hollywood, Fla. offered as being simple and certain. Only 5.5% of their delirium tremens patients have died, whereas 10% to 12% is the average, 37% the high.

Drs. Piker & Cohn never put a D. T. patient in a straitjacket. They hog-tie him only when they lack enough robust nurses to gentle the patient.

They calm the patient with paraldehyde.

They rarely give barbiturates (like allonal) because those drugs rarely quiet a drunk and do depress his circulation. They never give morphine, because that drug increases pressure on the brain and brings on death. They reduce intracranial pressure by draining fluid through a puncture in the spine. Most men who die in delirium tremens die because their hearts give way. Drs. Piker & Cohn prevent that by loading the patient with digitalis. Digitalis, besides being a heart regulator, is a diuretic, something the raving drunkard requires. In delirium tremens the digestive system is out of whack. Drs. Piker & Cohn wash out the patient’s stomach, purge him with cascara and Epsom salts, feed him well. And three times daily the doctors alkalize the patient with potus imperialis, a drink of ½ oz. cream of tartar dissolved in 3 pints of water, sweetened and flavored with lemon peel. They never rouse a sleeping drunk “for any reason, medicinal or otherwise.”

Average time in the hospital for Piker & Cohn D. T. patients is 4.8 days.