Abstract
AbstractTaking the humoral body as its spatial focus, this article considers how medical writers and practitioners engaged with ‘intoxicants’ both in terms of the prescription of medicines and in the conceptualization of compulsive consumption – or what is often styled by modern practitioners as ‘addiction’. Focusing in the first instance on the compilers of vernacular pharmacopoeia – compilations of medical ingredients and techniques – the article argues that just as sugar, tobacco, and especially opiates had a significant and possibly transformative role in everyday physic, so the ‘operation’ of opiates, distilled spirits, and tobacco was crucial in stimulating new thinking about how bodies became substance-dependent. The article also argues, however, that, in order to conceptualize the problem, writers turned to the venerable language of custom rather than the relatively new language of addiction – in particular, the ancient idea of custom as ‘second nature’.
Highlights
Taking the humoral body as its spatial focus, this article considers how medical writers and practitioners engaged with ‘intoxicants’ both in terms of the prescription of medicines and in the conceptualization of compulsive consumption – or what is often styled by modern practitioners as ‘addiction’
The article argues, that, in order to conceptualize the problem, writers turned to the venerable language of custom rather than the relatively new language of addiction – in particular, the ancient idea of custom as ‘second nature’
The burden of Levine’s analysis was to show that it was in the 1780s that the medical writer Benjamin Rush ‘organised the developing medical and common-sense wisdom’ about habitual drunkards into ‘the first modern conception of alcohol addiction’
Summary
I ‘Whatsoever a Man gives himself unto, that he becomes strong in, be it either good or evil’ – so warned the popular health and lifestyle writer Thomas Tryon, in 1691.1 Tryon went onto explain that if it be to drink more than need and Nature requires, he will in a little time come both to expect and need it; the like, if it be Drink that is improper, as Brandy, Wine, or the like; nay, if it be Coffee or Tea, if a Man be not wary, the use of it shall enslave him, so that he shall not know how to be without, and from drinking it moderately, he shall by degrees, and as it were insensibly slip into excess; and the very same thousands can experience of Tobacco.[2].
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