Rum Maniacs traces how alcoholic insanity became a subject of medical interest, social controversy, and perverse fascination in the early American republic. At the heart of that story is the history of delirium tremens and the vivid hallucinations that characterize the disease. First described in 1813, delirium tremens marked the beginning of the dramatic intervention of the American medical profession into the social response to alcohol abuse. Long before doctors began using the terms “alcoholism” or “addiction,” studying and treating delirium tremens changed how the medical profession observ ... More

Rum Maniacs traces how alcoholic insanity became a subject of medical interest, social controversy, and perverse fascination in the early American republic. At the heart of that story is the history of delirium tremens and the vivid hallucinations that characterize the disease. First described in 1813, delirium tremens marked the beginning of the dramatic intervention of the American medical profession into the social response to alcohol abuse. Long before doctors began using the terms “alcoholism” or “addiction,” studying and treating delirium tremens changed how the medical profession observed, understood, and treated the more general problem of alcohol abuse. Indeed, the delirium tremens diagnosis became the foundation for the medical conviction and popular belief that heavy, habitual drinking was pathological—a self-destructive compulsion that constituted a psychological and physiological disease. The history of pathological drinking illuminates the social and cultural significance of disease and medicine in the boom-and-bust economy of the early nineteenth century. Focusing especially on Philadelphia, then the undisputed capital of American medicine, Rum Maniacs describes how ambitious young physicians set out to remake the profession in response to a competitive marketplace and compelling controversies over troubling social ills, such as urban poverty, economic instability, and, epidemic disease. New medical beliefs and practices both reflected and shaped emerging social distinctions, especially along the lines of class and gender. In popular culture, pathological drinking became a sensational topic of lurid speculation, dramatizing highly fraught issues of masculine success and failure in a culture obsessively concerned with both.