WHEN SEEN on the general medical and surgical wards of a hospital, organic brain syndromes may indicate a poor prognosis with a high mortality. In 1964, Guze and Cantwell1reported a study of 117 patients with organic brain syndromes seen in consultation over a four-year period. Their findings, among other things, indicated a high mortality rate during the index admission when compared to the mortality of all hospital admissions during the same period. They concluded that "These figures indicate that patients referred for psychiatric consultation (presumably because they created a disturbance on the ward) who received a diagnosis of `organic brain' syndrome were much sicker than other general hospital patients." They point out, however, that "The data do not permit any conclusions, of course, about the comparative prognosis between patients of similar age, sex, and medical diagnosis with and without the psychiatric