Medicine: Vanishing Elephants

Like free lunch, the pink elephant is passing from the U. S. alcoholic scene. So wrote young Dr. John Burton Dynes of Boston in the New England Journal of Medicine last week. Dr. Dynes interviewed 57 victims of delirium tremens in Psychopathic Hospital, asked each patient to describe the various Animals he saw leaping around on the walls, ceiling, bed. Only four drunkards saw elephants, only one of the elephants was pink. One patient howled that he was being devoured by a whale, another begged Dr. Dynes to save him from a raging hippopotamus. Other denizens of the D. T. jungle...

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