‘Demoralised Drunkards’ and ‘Respectable Lunatics’: Alcohol and Psychiatry in Late Victorian Scotland

Abstract

During the nineteenth century, Western medicine debated whether habitual drunkenness should be viewed as a disease that required medical attention and treatment in its own right. Scottish medicine was engaged in this debate from Thomas Trotter’s Essay on Drunkenness in 1804 to the Scottish Inebriate Act of 1898. Could the “vice” of intemperance become the “disease” of inebriety? The nineteenth century saw heavy per capita alcohol consumption in Scotland, and Scottish infirmaries and asylums admitted many patients with the physical and mental consequences of heavy alcohol intake. Given this background of accumulated clinical experience, extensive evidence was taken from Scottish physicians and alienists, among others, in an 1895 inquiry into inebriety. A rich picture of the medical theory of the time emerges from the evidence taken, and this article attempts to set these views in their context and to measure their success, or otherwise, in the subsequent short-lived “inebriate reformatory” experiment in Scotland.