Free Delivery Over $100
|
|
|||
|
||||
OverviewEdgar Allan Poe vividly recalls standing in a prison cell, fearing for his life, as he watched men mutilate and dismember the body of his mother. That memory, however graphic and horrifying, was not real. It was a hallucination, one of many suffered by the writer, caused by his addiction to alcohol. InRum Maniacs, Matthew Warner Osborn reveals 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 disease that Poe suffered: delirium tremens. First described in 1813, delirium tremens and its characteristic hallucinations inspired sweeping changes in how the medical profession saw and treated the problems of alcohol abuse. Based on new theories of pathological anatomy, human physiology, and mental illness, the new diagnosis founded the medical conviction and popular belief that habitual drinking could become a psychological and physiological disease. By midcentury, delirium tremens had inspired a wide range of popular theater, poetry, fiction, and illustration. This romantic fascination endured into the twentieth century, most notably in the classic Disney cartoonDumbo, in which a pink pachyderm marching band haunts a drunken young elephant.Rum Maniacsreveals just how delirium tremens shaped the modern experience of alcohol addiction as a psychic struggle with inner demons. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Matthew Warner OsbornPublisher: The University of Chicago Press Imprint: University of Chicago Press Dimensions: Width: 1.60cm , Height: 0.20cm , Length: 2.30cm Weight: 0.510kg ISBN: 9780226099897ISBN 10: 022609989 Pages: 280 Publication Date: 14 March 2014 Audience: Professional and scholarly , Professional & Vocational Format: Hardback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: Out of stock  The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available. Table of ContentsReviewsA fascinating social and intellectual history of the medical profession in early America, Rum Maniacs traces the many ways in which a new disease of delirium tremens became visible -- in newspapers, medical journals, hospital records, temperance activism, popular entertainment, and clinical practice. In its detailed but wide-ranging attention to institutions, practices, theories, and aspirations shaping medical education, it offers a sophisticated casestudy of the interplay of learned and popular cultures by which pathological drinking came to be imagined by nineteenth-century Americans. --Tom Augst New York University Author InformationMatthew Warner Osborn is assistant professor of history at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
||||
