1890'S ALCOHOLISM TREATMENTS
AREN'T YOU GLAD IT IS NOW AND NOT THEN
By 1900 treatments for alcoholism... At this point, the various treatments for alcoholics can be divided into ten groups: penal and punitive treatments; institutionalization; separate from legal systems; mental treatments, including psychotherapy and hypnosis; temperance societies; drug cures; immunological and serum treatments; health and nutrition cures; radical treatments; quack cures; and religious conversion cures.
page 26, paragraph 1, line 1 & paragraph 2
Read extending his theory of alcoholics etiology, suggested that the number of alcoholics might be helped, or decreased, even more rapidly, if there were strict laws against alcoholics having any children, since that would decrease the chance of alcoholism being passed among any more generations in the gene pool. He also felt that fewer cases of alcoholism would develop because fewer children would be raised in a home run by an alcoholic person.
page 31, paragraph 2, lines 2-11
...their be compulsory sterilization of all alcoholics with the idea that this would be both a humane way of treating people in contrast with forced celibacy and this sterilization would more rapidly cut down on the amount of inherited alcoholism.
page 31, paragraph 2, lines 17-22
In many other states, the drunkard was considered insane and, could be incarcerated without any rights in an insane asylum
page 32, paragraph 2, lines 1-3
...recommended placing the third class of alcoholic, the incurable, in an insane asylum.
page 38, paragraph 2, lines 1,2
The antibody antiethyline was developed in France by Broca-Soucellier, Sepalier and Thibault, was produced by injecting a horse with alcohol until the horse exhibited physical dependence n alcohol. Blood was then drawn from the horse and the antibody separated from the serum. This substance, when injected into alcoholics, was then alleged to effect a change in the alcoholics so that he could no longer tolerate alcohol. Supposedly, antiethyline awakened the instinctive reflexes of the alcoholic which brought out the "natural" habit of abstinence, leaving the alcoholic without any desire for alcohol.
page 61, paragraph 3, lines 1-13
The sterilization of alcoholics was justified on the grounds that irritating physical causes for their alcoholism might possibly be eliminated. Many doctors believed that alcoholism was largely hereditary; sterilization would reduce the number of offspring in each generation who could possibly inherit the tendency toward alcoholism. In addition, it was felt that fewer people would suffer from the effects of having an alcoholic in the family, resulting in a decrease in the numbers of persons on the welfare rolls.
page 66, paragraph 1
Another radical cure for alcoholism was suggested by an English physician. He observed that when an alcoholic patient contracted a disease that caused great personal discomfort, he soon lost interest in drinking. He noted that gonorrhea seemed to be especially incompatible with the desire to drink. He suggested that if alcoholics were to be inoculated with the organism or forced to contract it, they would soon gladly give up drinking, for at least three months.
page 67, paragraph 2
from: AA The Way It Began by Pill Pitman