| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Sarah W. Tracy. Alcoholism in America: From Reconstruction to Prohibition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2005. Pp. xxiii, 357. $48.00.
Historians of alcohol and temperance have eagerly awaited the publication of Sarah W. Tracy's monograph on the medical treatment of alcoholic inebriety in its heyday between 1870 and 1920. While the book is based on Tracy's 1992 dissertation, it has benefited from substantial additional archival research and rewriting. The result is a meticulous and smart consideration of the significance of physicians' attempts to define excessive drinking as primarily a medical problem, and to develop inebriate asylums to treat it.	1
Fundamentally, this is a story of the failed attempt of a profession to coopt a social problem. With the rise of the temperance movement in the early nineteenth century, reformers had constructed homes in which inebriates could learn to live sober lives, benefiting from the fellowship of their fellow sufferers and the supervision and support of the reform minded. In the late nineteenth century, medical professionals, convinced that excessive drinking was a disease rather than merely a vice, dedicated themselves to establishing physician-run institutions to treat it under medical principles. They succeeded in opening many private asylums, and in convincing New York City, Connecticut, Minnesota, Iowa, and Massachusetts to establish publicly funded ones. Although these institutions differed from one to another, and changed significantly over time, they tended to require lengthy residence, during which inmates would rebuild their besotted manhood by performing outdoor manual labor, developing healthy leisure activities and a regular daily routine, practicing some form of religious observance, and interacting closely with upright models of successful manhood like the asylum superintendent.	. . .

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