In "Rum Maniacs," Matthew Osborn traces how and why pathological drinking became a subject of medical interest, social controversy, and lurid fascination in the early American republic. At the heart of that story is the history of delirium tremens and the fantastic terrors that characterize the disease. It was a relatively new disease, however, having been first described by British physicians in 1813. Why, Osborn asks, did a well-known condition that had long held no interest to physicians suddenly become a cutting-edge ...
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In "Rum Maniacs," Matthew Osborn traces how and why pathological drinking became a subject of medical interest, social controversy, and lurid fascination in the early American republic. At the heart of that story is the history of delirium tremens and the fantastic terrors that characterize the disease. It was a relatively new disease, however, having been first described by British physicians in 1813. Why, Osborn asks, did a well-known condition that had long held no interest to physicians suddenly become a cutting-edge medical diagnosis? The diagnosis was made possible in part by broad developments within the medical profession including the transatlantic circulation of medical texts and journals, the rapid expansion of medical education, and the growing practice of pathological anatomy but also by historical developments outside the medical sphere including contemporary trends in literary and popular culture that physicians drew upon in their narrative case histories of the disease. Delirium tremens, Osborn shows, was inseparable from the intellectual, social, economic, and cultural developments that occurred in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This blossoming interest marked the beginning of the dramatic intervention of the American medical profession into the social response to alcohol abuse (or intemperance, as it was then termed)."
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