One of the commonest problems confronting the practicing physician today is alcoholism. Treatment of the patient with alcoholism encompasses not only the acute phase but also the chronic cases, which may include patients with the difficult problems of hallucinosis and delirium tremens. Alcoholic withdrawal, when complicated by acute hallucinations, disorientation, excitement, and hyperkinesia, is a difficult condition to manage in the average general hospital, unless the hospital is equipped with specific facilities for handling confused, disoriented, and perhaps belligerent patients. For this reason, or excuse, many general hospitals refuse admission to alcoholic patients; often physicians too may be guilty of shunning the alcoholic patient and refusing to accept him psychologically or realistically as a sick person in need of hospital care. For the alcoholic, withdrawal is a serious metabolic disorder involving basic abnormalities in glucose and vitamin metabolism, nutritional disturbances, and less understood enzymatic and biochemical alterations. Perhaps if we