Roy Porter Student Prize Essay Winner
Diseased Imaginations: Constructing Delirium Tremens in Philadelphia, 1813–1832
* PhD Candidate, US History, University of California at Davis, 5753 Hermann Street, Oakland, CA 94609, USA. E-mail: mwosborn{at}ucdavis.edu
First described in British medical journals in 1813, delirium tremens became a subject of intense interest in the Philadelphia medical community in the 1820s. While the linkage between alcohol abuse and insanity had long been widely accepted, the delirium tremens diagnosis separated the disorder from other forms of mental illness and established the inebriate as a distinct category of study and treatment. Through dissection of the disease's victims, doctors searched for the effects of habitual intoxication on the body and soon turned to investigate the physiological basis of the inebriate's compulsion to drink, thereby shaping later nineteenth-century conceptions of the pathology of alcohol abuse. Medical interest in delirium tremens emanated in part from a broad cultural fascination with the supernatural and hallucinations. Doctors filled the medical literature on the disease with detailed descriptions of phantoms, ghosts, and other forms of supernatural horror. In the context of the depression that followed the financial panic of 1819, delirium tremens became a highly symbolic phenomenon that resonated with the economic instability faced by the urban middle class. Doctors' detailed accounts of patients' hallucinations quickly passed back into popular culture, shaping a new and dark conception of the psychology of inebriety in antebellum America.
Keywords: delirium tremens; alcohol withdrawal; alcoholism; addiction; insanity; anatomy; supernatural; hallucinations; Benjamin Rush; Edgar Allan Poe