Peter and Bill --

I know this is not what Peter was asking for, but the trouble with the standard literature on this is that it is still so focused on the US and a little on Britain. We really need some work trying to trace what happens where and when elsewhere. Does the Foucauldian shift to an addiction/alcoholism concept found for the US by Harry Levine and Mairi McCormick (and confirmed by Peter himself, against the counterarguments of Warner and Porter; Contemporary Drug Problems 28:363-390, 2001) show up at the same time in other places; does the timing and places of its appearance mirror a growth in/diffusion of temperance thinking; or can the shift happen without an attachment to temperance thinking? The materials for doing such an analysis are probably available in the secondary literature for at least many European and English-speaking countries, but I'm not aware of anyone specifically taking this issue on cross-culturally.

What can be done more eaily is track the institutional inception and diffusion of inebriate homes and asylums and to some extent the diffusion of medical ideas. Jim Baumohl and I started down this track some time ago (http://www.bks.no/bauroom.pdf). Papers like Tom Babor's (Classification of alcoholics: Typology theories from the 19th century to the present. Alcohol Health and Research World 20(1):6-17, 1996) summarize some aspects of the shifts in medical thinking.

But this task is not the same as the histoire de mentalités task of studying shifts in popular conceptualization.

I was embarrassed the other day when a couple of Finns asked me when the terms "addiction" and "addict" begin to be widely used in English in approximately its modern sense -- for this I had no better off-the-cuff answer than "maybe around 1900". Does anyone have a better answer? Crothers is using it unselfconsciously in 1902, and Towns talks about "tobacco addiction" in 1915. I suspect the term would have been recognizable to an American newspaper reader by 1910 -- but to a British or Australian??

(An interesting sidelight is that neither Finnish or Swedish have a word for "addiction" -- there was an old term roughly equivalent to "inebriety", and now there is an exact translation of "dependence", but the common term used in Swedish where "addiction" would be used in English translates as "misuse".)

[Second sidelight: I went to the New York Times ProQuest archives, http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/nytimes/advancedsearch.html, and found that "addiction" and "addict" both were occurring about 10 times a year in NYT articles at the eginning of the archive, around 1851 and 1852. But in the more general meaning of "bound over to" or "devoted to", albeit with a very negative connotation. An example which I could see and pass along for free (the use was in the first paragraph):

The eagerness of those prints which addict themselves of the interest of absolutism, leads them into all manner of adsurdities. It was only a day or two since, one of them, if possible a little more stringent in its anti-popular nations than the rest of its diminutive tribe, leveled a compound syllogism, at Hungarian patriotism, of which the following is perhaps a fair statement:... ["German radicalism", New York Daily Times, Dec. 18, 1851])

Robin

-----Original Message-----
From: Alcohol and Drugs History Society [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Bill White
Sent: Sunday, October 03, 2004 2:52 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Science of Alcoholism

Peter,

The following are among the classics on this topic.

Brown, E. (1985). What shall we do with the Inebriate? Asylum Treatment and the Disease Concept of Alcoholism in the Late Nineteenth Century. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 21:48-59.

Bynum, W. (1968). Chronic Alcoholism in the First Half of the 19th Century. Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 42:160-185.

Levine, H. (1978). The Discovery of Addiction: Changing Conceptions of Habitual Drunkenness in America. Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 39(2):143-174.

MacLeod, R. (1967). The Edge of Hope: Social Policy and Chronic Alcoholism 1870-1900. Journal of History of Medicine, 23:215-245.

Marconi, J. (1959). The Concept of Alcoholism. Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol 20(2):216-235.

There is also an annotated chronology of the disease concept of addictiuon that is posted at www.bhrm.org (under "Papers and Publications--Addiction") that you may find helpful.

Bill White

-----Original Message-----

From: Alcohol and Drugs History Society

[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Peter Ferentzy

Sent: Saturday, October 02, 2004 7:40 PM

To: [log in to unmask]

Subject: Science of Alcoholism

I'd be interested in one or two concise chronological accounts of the

scientific ideas surrounding chronic drunkenness in the 18th and 19th

centuries in North America. I'm aware of quite a few books, but not too

many articles. I'm looking for brief overviews right now.

Thanking you all in advance,

Peter