This thing is bugging me since I first played this game yeaaaaars ago. It's counter intuitive. You have to instantly build a well in every fort(and that can be either really easy or terribly hard to do, depending on your embark location you can have a river and ponds, or have nothing and the first carvern 50 levels below, in evil biome, good luck building entire windmill collection on your first year to pump out some water), because if your dwarf get injured, they will die of dehydration. That's stupid. Dwarfs drink ONLY alcohol, all their lives. They are grumpy when they drink water, and yet, once they become injured, apparently it's better for them to just die instead of have a mug of ale.
I can fully understand the need for clean water for... cleaning wounds. That's perfectly reasonable.
I could understand if drinking alcohol while injured would cause the wound to heal slower. That's reasonable.
I could understand if there would be some risk of infection if dwarf was drinking alcohol instead of water while being in hospital. Totally fair.
But death due to dehydration, because your dwarf broke a leg feeling of the tree in winter and you didn't build well yet as it's your first year after embark is just plain STUPID.
Water in hospital should be PREFERRED, if there's no water, injured dwarfs should drink alcohol. Every time this happens I'm rolling my eyes so hard that I almost have to put them back into my eye sockets. It's little things like that that generally make me want to quit the game and leave. Others are children playing by the water outside in evil biome during horrible sludge rain, getting killed and forcing everyone to get out to get their stuff and getting killed as well, or at least making people terrified because they were caught in evil rain... Or children playing with dead bodies in atom smasher forcing me to kill them(because they apparently totally ignore burrows while playing) before dead bodies stop being dead, thus making parents unhappy about the whole thing... But the hospital is by far the most annoying and stupid thing I have ever encountered in this game.