Valentin Magnan and Sergey Korsakov: French and Russian pioneers in the study of alcohol abuse

This study focuses on two outstanding psychiatrists: the Frenchman Valentin Magnan (1835-1916) and the Russian Sergey Korsakov (1854-1900). Their international renown is primarily associated with their investigations into health consequences of alcohol consumption; they were pioneers in this field, and happened to know each other well. The similarities and differences are shown in social and scientific approaches adopted by these two scientists. In his work, Magnan focused mainly on absinthe and epilepsy; he considered alcoholism to be a hereditary mental disorder. Korsakov, after a period of work in Paris under Magnan's guidance, represented a more modern generation and was advancing fundamental ideas on the nature of psychoses and merging clinical features, somatic, psychological, and social factors. Although Magnan has practically disappeared from the current literature on alcoholism, Korsakov is still clearly present today.

Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions: Lara A. Ray

The APA Awards for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology recognize psychologists who have demonstrated excellence early in their careers and have held a doctoral degree for no more than 9 years. One of the 2017 award winners is Lara A. Ray, for "her substantive and innovative research on mechanisms that underlie alcohol and tobacco use disorders and for leveraging that knowledge to develop new, personalized treatment approaches for these disorders." Ray's award citation, biography, and a selected bibliography are presented here. (PsycINFO Database Record

Scott Fitzgerald: famous writer, alcoholism and probable epilepsy

Scott Fitzgerald, a world-renowned American writer, suffered from various health problems, particularly alcohol dependence, and died suddenly at the age of 44. According to descriptions in A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway, Fitzgerald had episodes resembling complex partial seizures, raising the possibility of temporal lobe epilepsy.

Humphry Fortescue Osmond (1917-2004), a radical and conventional psychiatrist: The transcendent years

This article describes the life and work of the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond who pursued a radical path as a psychiatrist while he remained within the establishment. To the public mind however, he is best known as the man who introduced Aldous Huxley to mescaline and coined the iconic word psychedelic. From an early stage of his career, Henry Osmond embraced new ideas to break the nexus in psychiatry at a time when neither biological nor psychoanalytic treatments were shown to have much benefit. To do this, he joined the radical social experiment in health in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan where he initiated a range of innovations that attracted international attention, as well as controversy over his espousal of the use of hallucinogens better to understand the experiences of psychotic patients.

[Therapeutic communities: "new" outlooks and public health proposals]

Problems related to alcohol and other substance abuse are on a steady rise. Certain controversial measures currently aim at immediate solutions, such as the public funding of therapeutic communities. The article draws comparisons between the legacy of early twentieth-century public health practices in psychoactive substance abuse and current proposals for intervention through therapeutic communities. The study researched primary sources from the perspective of historical materialism. Historically produced by society as a whole, problems stemming from substance abuse continue to place the greatest burden on users, the people around them, and public health.

[Alcoholism and the aesthetics of existence: Jack London and the white logic of John Barleycorn]

Employing this theme as a guideline, this article examines how his prose amounts to self-practice in the construction of subjectivity and the organization of existence. It investigates how this work is related to the theme of self-care, analyzed by Michel Foucault in volumes 2 and 3 of the History of sexuality, as regards the aesthetics of existence and the art of living which existed in the Greco-Roman and Hellenistic worlds.

[EMMANUIL ISAAKOVICH DEICHMAN (1889-1967) AS ONE OF LEADERS OF ANTI-ALCOHOLIC MOVEMENT OF THE I920S IN THE USSR: TO ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY]

The article presents for the first time the biography of E.I. Deichman, one of leaders of anti-alcoholic movement. The input of E.I. Deichman into struggle with drunkenness and alcoholism in the 1920s is concertized.

Making animals alcoholic: shifting laboratory models of addiction

The use of animals as experimental organisms has been critical to the development of addiction research from the nineteenth century. They have been used as a means of generating reliable data regarding the processes of addiction that was not available from the study of human subjects. Their use, however, has been far from straightforward. Through focusing on the study of alcoholism, where the nonhuman animal proved a most reluctant collaborator, this paper will analyze the ways in which scientists attempted to deal with its determined sobriety and account for their consistent failure to replicate the volitional consumption of ethanol to the point of physical dependency. In doing so, we will see how the animal model not only served as a means of interrogating a complex pathology, but also came to embody competing definitions of alcoholism as a disease process, and alternative visions for the very structure and purpose of a research field.

Mobilizing Clouston in the colonies? General paralysis of the insane at the Auckland Mental Hospital, 1868-99

This article examines the diagnosis of general paralysis of the insane (GPI) at the Auckland Mental Hospital, New Zealand, between 1868 and 1899, and changes in the identified causes of this condition. It argues that despite long-standing evidence citing the role of syphilis, asylum doctors working in New Zealand were as reluctant as their English and Scottish colleagues to blame syphilis alone for GPI. It also argues that although syphilis became a more popular cause in the aetiology of GPI by the end of the nineteenth century, medical and non-medical sources continued to cite other causes for GPI.

"An army of reformed drunkards and clergymen": the medicalization of habitual drunkenness, 1857-1910

Historians have recognized that men with drinking problems were not simply the passive subjects of medical reform and urban social control in Gilded Age and Progressive Era America but also actively shaped the partial medicalization of habitual drunkenness. The role played by evangelical religion in constituting their agency and in the historical process of medicalization has not been adequately explored, however. A post-Civil War evangelical reform culture supported institutions that treated inebriates along voluntary, religious lines and lionized former drunkards who publicly promoted a spiritual cure for habitual drunkenness. This article documents the historical development and characteristic practices of this reform culture, the voluntarist treatment institutions associated with it, and the hostile reaction that developed among medical reformers who sought to treat intemperance as a disease called inebriety. Those physicians' attempts to promote therapeutic coercion for inebriates as medical orthodoxy and to deprive voluntarist institutions of public recognition failed, as did their efforts to characterize reformed drunkards who endorsed voluntary cures as suffering from delusions arising from their disease. Instead, evangelical traditions continued to empower reformed drunkards to publicize their own views on their malady which laid the groundwork for continued public interest in alcoholics' personal narratives in the twentieth century. Meanwhile, institutions that accommodated inebriates' voluntarist preferences proliferated after 1890, marginalizing the medical inebriety movement and its coercive therapeutics.

[The sanitary education and propaganda in struggle with drunkenness and alcoholism in the USSR in 1920s]

The article considers the issue of sanitary education and anti-alcoholic propaganda in the USSR in 1920s and also forms and content of these activities.

[The problems of struggle with alcoholism in works of Pirogov congresses]

The article demonstrates that the Pirogov Society considered prevalence of alcoholism in Russia as an important social problem. The Pirogov congresses discussed such issues as impact of alcohol on human organism, principles of organization of struggle with alcoholism and its treatment and the role of physicians in the struggle with alcoholism as well.

The Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs and the Rutgers Center of Alcohol Studies: a history of the evolution of alcohol research

This article reviews the history of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs as well as the Rutgers Center of Alcohol Studies. Each has its roots in the Yale Laboratory of Applied Physiology and the era shortly after the repeal of National Prohibition in the United States. The journal was founded as the Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol in 1940 by Howard W. Haggard, M.D., director of the Yale Laboratory of Physiology. Alcohol, although not originally the sole focus of the laboratory, eventually became the main and then only focus. A Section of Alcohol Studies and later Center of Alcohol Studies formally became components of the laboratory. The faculty grew to include notable figures such as Elvin Morton Jellinek and Mark Keller, among other influential people who helped establish a modern, multidisciplinary, scientific approach to alcohol problems in the United States. The first alcohol education program, originally called the Summer Session of the School of Alcohol Studies, was also founded there in 1943. The center later moved to Rutgers University in New Jersey, becoming the Rutgers Center of Alcohol Studies in 1962. With it came the summer school and the Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol, which in 1975 became the Journal of Studies on Alcohol. The journal again changed names in 2007, becoming the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, reflecting an increasing focus among substance use researchers on drugs other than alcohol. This article discusses the influence of the journal and the center in the larger historical context of alcohol studies throughout the 20th century to the modern day.

[Alcoholism around the turn of the 20th century: the Belgian positions in European debates]

In Europe, between 1880 and 1914, the alcoolism, one of the three social ills, represents more than ever a concern among the society's leaders against the ravages it causes in their working class. In this context, two schools of "anti-alcoholism" clash to policy matters: to prevent to only spirits or any form of alcohol beverage. Belgium, land of beer, forms an integral part of the debate...

What do we know about the medical biography of Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938)? A summary of the state of knowledge and outlook on relevant issues for further research

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder and first President of the Turkish republic, is the subject of many more or less 'heroic' biographies and few critical ones. His anamnesis, however, is only available in fragments. Many books omit details of Atatürk's health and life, for example his bloodline, his illness and eventually his death, his funeral prayer and ceremony and his burial. His liver problem, diagnosed as cirrhosis and said to be the cause of his death, is well described but his general health and other sicknesses are scarcely recorded. This paper provides an overview of his anamnesis as far as it is known, the literature describing it and the level of knowledge generally published, and it also indicates where original research in the archives is needed to complete the picture.

[E. M. Jellinek's silenced and silencing transgenerational story]

Jellinek is a kind of archetypal character for future generations in the field of addiction studies. His implosion in the arena of alcoholism around the age of 50 was an unexpected challenge to medical science. We know very little about his own role models giving an intellectual and moral compass to his pragmatic creativity. More than 30 years has passed since Jellinek's death when an American sociologist Ron Roizen started unearthing his silent story. Roizen discerned that there are a lot of unsaid and muted issues in his personal Hungarian past. Our paper, based on the authors' research in Hungarian archives and other sources reveals that not just Jellinek's personal but his transgenerational narrative has been not-yet-said. This silenced and silencing history appears an unfinished business of acculturation of the family, which started prior to four generations. Authors have been concluding that the issue of religious conversion is a critical point in the process of acculturation. They examine the counter move of loyalty to family values and driving force of assimilation making their story unspeakable.

Les faux-semblants d'une politique internationale : la Société des Nations et la lutte contre l'alcoolisme dans les mandats (1919-1930)

Sous l’influence de mouvements coloniaux humanitaires, la Société des Nations impose aux puissances de tutelle des ex-colonies allemandes, devenues mandats B et C, de mener une politique antialcoolique. Celle-ci constitue ce qu’on appellerait aujourd’hui un « agenda international ». Elle est maintenue par l’instance chargée de superviser les administrations mandataires, la Commission Permanente des Mandats, en dépit de doutes croissants sur la validité de l’argument démographique qui contribue à la justifier : la dépopulation des colonies censément entraînée par les importations d’alcool européen. Confrontée à l’incertitude de ses experts sur l’incidence réelle de l’alcoolisme, et à la hausse tendantielle des importations d’alcools dans les mandats, cette commission s’en tient néanmoins à l’agenda antialcoolique, et exerce en la matière une influence normative manifeste sur l’exercice colonial du pouvoir dans les mandats.

Suicide, alcoholism, and psychiatric illness among union forces during the U.S. Civil War

Little is known about post-combat psychological reactions of warriors prior to the Twentieth Century. We estimated rates of suicide, alcohol abuse, and probable psychiatric illness among Union Forces during the U.S. Civil War via examination of data compiled by the Union Army. White active-duty military personnel suicide rates ranged from 8.74 to 14.54 per 100,000 during the war, and surged to 30.4 the year after the war. For blacks, rates ranged from 17.7 in the first year of their entry into the war (1863), to 0 in their second year, and 1.8 in the year after the war. Rates for most other relevant domains, including chronic alcoholism, "nostalgia," and insanity, were extremely low (<1.0%) by modern day standards. Data provide contextual information on suicide and psychiatric variables for combatants during the U.S. Civil War, a brutal modern war with vastly higher casualty rates than recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Limited to no responsibility: addiction, alcoholism and the law in modern Germany

In Germany, a perpetrator had to be of sound mind to be convicted of a crime throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The criminal code was clear, but reality was not. From the moment that physicians accepted alcoholism and drug addiction as diseases of mind and body, the question of what to do with alcoholic and addicted criminals troubled legal theorists. How were judges to maintain the balance of justice if, on the one hand, a potential perpetrator chose to be of unsound mind by drinking or using drugs, but on the other, he was sick, unable to control his actions? As this article demonstrates, the legal system was lenient towards inebriated perpetrators as a by-product of the insistence of German doctors that alcoholism and addiction were diseases.

Bill W. goes to Hollywood: the rise and fall of recovering addiction experts

Although historians of addiction have long debated whether an oral culture of "sharing" or "Big Book"-based reading practices are foundational to 12-step recovery culture, the role other types of media have played in the development of contemporary recovery discourse has remained largely unexplored. This essay compares the production, reception and formal elements of the films The Lost Weekend and Smash Up in relation to the popularization of the disease concept of alcoholism. Through an analysis of archival sources, addiction narratives, and nascent alcoholism research, this paper argues that, by emphasizing the importance of popular representations of alcoholics above scientific inquiry, early recovering "experts" successfully promulgated the disease concept of alcoholism, but the testimonials of later recovering alcoholics became relegated to the sphere of popular culture.

[Dr Anto Marić (1897-1982): a journey from alcohology and dermatovenereology to psychiatry and balneology]

Dr Anto Marić (1897-1982) was born in Vukšić in Bosnia. He completed medical studies in Vienna and Prague. He published his results from the Department for dermatovenerology at Sarajevo State Hospital, Bosnia. He engaged himself in the movement against alcoholism, too. Later he moved to the Neuropsychiatry ward in Belgrade and was appointed manager in a new psychiatry hospital in Kovin, Serbia. For years he had been a community physician in Stanišić in Vojvodina. During the Second World War, he worked in the psychiatric hospital Vrapče at the outskirts of Zagreb, Croatia and after the war he became the head of a thermal spa in Srebrenica, Bosnia. After specialisation in balneology, he came to Rijeka to overlook the reconstruction of a thermal spa near Buzet in Istria. He made use of his long experience in dermatovenerology, neuropsychiatry and balneology to promote the importance of the unity between physical and psychological for maintaining human health.

Socio-political implications of the fight against alcoholism and tuberculosis in Colombia, 1910-1925

The emergence of a modern state in Colombia and the centralization of political and administrative power in Bogotá began to take shape during the latter decades of the nineteenth century. The state had a central role within the overarching modernisation discourse that sought to create a common national identity. One of the tasks assigned to the state by the national project was that of implementing policy for regulating public health and strengthening social control institutions. Such objectives should be analyzed as part of larger political centralization processes and the desire to create "ideal" citizens. Public health and sanitary campaigns implemented by government officials during this period targeted vice, immorality, illness and ignorance under the umbrella of social reform programmes. Government officials, hygienists and medical doctors continually placed emphasis on eradicating or regulating alcoholism and tuberculosis from 1910 to 1925, with the hopes of avoiding a national crisis. This paper examines how alcoholism and tuberculosis became central themes in the fears expressed by Colombia's ruling class at the time regarding the broader social decay of the nation. As intellectuals and public officials sought solutions to these ills, their explanations alluded to the disintegration of morality and values and the degenerative effects of vice, addiction and unsanitary conditions.