Main description:

The medicalisation of alcohol use has become a prominent discourse that guides policy makers and impacts public perceptions of alcohol and drinking. This book maps the historical and cultural dimensions of the phenomenon. Emphasising medical attitudes and theories regarding alcohol and the changing perception of alcohol consumption in psychiatry and mental health, it explores the shift from the use of alcohol in clinical treatment and as part of dietary regimens to the emergence of alcoholism as a disease category that requires medical intervention and is considered a threat to public health. -- .

Contents:

Introduction: comparative and transnational perspectives on alcohol, psychiatry and society, c. 1500-1991 - Waltraud Ernst and Thomas Muller
1 Corrupting the body and mind: distilled spirits, drunkenness and disease in early-modern England and the British Atlantic world - David Korostyshevsky
2 Alcoholism, degeneration, madness and psychiatry in Spain, c. 1870-1923 - Ricardo Campos
3 From nutrition to powerful agent of degeneration: alcohol in nineteenth-century Chile and Brazil - Mauricio Becerra Rebolledo
4 'White man's kava' in Fiji: entangling alcohol, race and insanity, c. 1874-1970 - Jacqueline Leckie
5 'In the hot and trying climate of Nigeria the European has a much stronger temptation to indulge in alcohol than the native': drunkenness in Nigeria, c. 1880-1940 - Simon Heap
6 Alcohol, abstinence and rationalisation in Germany, c. 1870s-1910s - Jasmin Broetz
7 'Disciples of Asclepius' or 'advocates of Hermes'? Psychiatrists and alcohol in early twentieth-century Greece - Kostis Gkotsinas
8 The fear of the immoderate Muslim: alcohol, civilisation and the theories of the Ecole d'Alger, c. 1930-62 - Nina Saloua Studer
9 Alcoholism, family and society in post-WWII Japan - Akira Hashimoto
10 'May it last, such peace and life': treating alcoholism in Tito's Yugoslavia, 1948-91 - Mat Savelli
11 A cradle of psychotherapy: treatment of alcohol addiction in communist Czechoslovakia, c. 1948-89 - Adela Gjuricova
12 'A society that is sinking ever deeper into a state of chronic alcohol poisoning': medical and moral treatment of alcoholics in the Soviet Union, c. 1970-91 - Christian Werkmeister
Index -- .