IsisCB Explore

Thesis ID: CBB001561307

The Anatomy of Intemperance: Alcohol and the Diseased Imagination in Philadelphia, 1784--1860 (2007)

Osborn, Matthew Warner (Author)

University of California, Davis

Publication Date: 2007
Physical Details: 332 pp.
Language: English

Outside Links

PubMed

Academia.edu

Medicine Alcoholism Mental disorders and diseases Alcohol Addictive behavior 18th century 19th century Philadelphia, PA

This study explores historical constructions of social difference by tracing medical responses to alcohol abuse in Philadelphia from the early national period through the Civil War. Central to this story is the history of the disease delirium tremens. During this period, new medical beliefs and practices surrounding alcoholic insanity had a profound influence in shaping conceptions of alcoholic addiction in American society and culture. The study charts how intellectual, cultural, and socioeconomic forces shaped medical practices, and how, in turn, new medical responses to alcohol abuse informed cultural conceptions of class, race, and gender. Chapter one traces how and why physicians in the early republic came to see alcohol abuse as a medical problem. First described in the United States at the Philadelphia Almshouse in 1815, delirium tremens is the primary subject of chapter two. The chapter addresses how the growth of the medical profession, the influence of new European medical theories, and the economic depression that followed the Panic of 1819 shaped physicians' interest in the new disease. Chapter three focuses on inebriates by drawing on a sample of over 1,500 individuals who died of alcohol abuse in Philadelphia between 1825 and 1850. The chapter links the delirium tremens diagnosis with social developments in Philadelphia, especially the growth of poverty and growing class differences. The final two chapters chart how physicians influenced cultural conceptions of alcohol abuse. Chapter four documents the professional imperatives, intellectual influences, and class expectations that impelled physicians' temperance activism, and the influence of medical science in shaping temperance ideology. The final chapter surveys representations of delirium tremens in mid nineteenth-century print culture, theater, and theatrical entertainment to explore why and how the phenomenon of alcoholic addiction came to have a compelling power in American mass culture.

...More

Description Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 68/09 (2008). Pub. no. AAT 3283017.

Citation URI

https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001561307/

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Thesis Metlay, Grischa Jeremy; (2010)
Learning from Drunk Monkeys: Expert Approaches to Alcohol and Drug Problems in Modern America (/isis/citation/CBB001567222/)

Article Osborn, Matthew Warner; (2006)
Diseased Imaginations: Constructing Delirium Tremens in Philadelphia, 1813--1832 (/isis/citation/CBB000770618/)

Article Santos, Fernando Sergio Dumas dos; Verani, Ana Carolina; (2010)
Alcoolismo e medicina psiquiátrica no Brasil do início do século XX (/isis/citation/CBB001420497/)

Thesis Nelson, Katherine H.; (2006)
The Temperance Physicians: Developing Concepts of Addiction (/isis/citation/CBB001561441/)

Article Lewy, Jonathan; (2012)
Limited to No Responsibility: Addiction, Alcoholism and the Law in Modern Germany (/isis/citation/CBB001232176/)

Book Waltraud Ernst; Thomas Muller; (2022)
Alcohol, Psychiatry and Society: Comparative and Transnational Perspectives, C. 1700–1990s (/isis/citation/CBB907976441/)

Book Preston, Margaret H.; hÓgartaigh, Margaret Ó; (2012)
Gender and Medicine in Ireland, 1700--1950 (/isis/citation/CBB001551161/)

Article Paul Eling; Alla Vein; (2018)
Valentin Magnan and Sergey Korsakov: French and Russian Pioneers in the Study of Alcohol Abuse (/isis/citation/CBB203732763/)

Book Osborn, Matthew Warner; (2014)
Rum Maniacs: Alcoholic Insanity in the Early American Republic (/isis/citation/CBB001422043/)

Article Neswald, Elizabeth; (2008)
“The Benefits of a Mechanics' Institute and the Blessing of Temperance.” Science and Temperance in 1840s Ireland (/isis/citation/CBB001023442/)

Book Azélina Jaboulet-Vercherre; (2014)
The Physician, the Drinker, and the Drunk: Wine's Uses and Abuses in Late Medieval Natural Philosophy (/isis/citation/CBB876618926/)

Article Ramsden, Edmund; (2015)
Making Animals Alcoholic: Shifting Laboratory Models of Addiction (/isis/citation/CBB001552053/)

Book Susan H. Brandt; (2022)
Women Healers: Gender, Authority, and Medicine in Early Philadelphia (/isis/citation/CBB316490420/)

Thesis Anroman, Gilda Marie; (2006)
Infectious Disease in Philadelphia, 1690--1807: An Ecological Perspective (/isis/citation/CBB001561688/)

Article Rotunda, Michele; (2007)
Savages to the Left of Me, Neurasthenics to the Right, Stuck in the Middle with You: Inebriety and Human Nature in American Society, 1855--1900. (/isis/citation/CBB000900115/)

Article Makras, Kostas; (2010)
Dickensian Intemperance: The Representation of the Drunkard in “The Drunkard's Death” and The Pickwick Papers (/isis/citation/CBB001022455/)

Book D'Antonio, Patricia; (2006)
Founding Friends: Families, Staff, and Patients at the Friends Asylum in Early Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (/isis/citation/CBB000641084/)

Thesis Conti, Meredith Ann; (2011)
Stages of Suffering: Performing Illness in the Late-Nineteenth-Century Theatre (/isis/citation/CBB001567295/)

Article Sara Black; (2019)
Morphine on Trial: Legal Medicine and Criminal Responsibility in the Fin de Siècle (/isis/citation/CBB218342384/)

Article Filippo Maria Sposini; (2020)
At the Borders of the Average Man: Adolphe Quêtelet on Mental, Moral, and Criminal Monstrosities (/isis/citation/CBB294903530/)

Comments

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}