| Review | Journal of Social History, 40.3

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| Review | Journal of Social History, 40.3 | The History Cooperative

REVIEWS

Alcoholism in America: From Reconstruction to Prohibition. By Sarah W. Tracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. xiii plus 357 pp. $48.00).
Historians who have investigated the history of alcohol use and abuse in United States history have traditionally focused on the rise and fall of National Prohibition. Their studies of the period between the CivilWar and Prohibition have dwelled on the activities of such groups as the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and the Anti-Saloon League. Few historians have looked at the other major story concerning alcohol, the challenge of dealing with alcoholics and alcoholism. The purpose of Sarah W. Tracy's book is to address this often-neglected subject, concentrating on the years between the founding of the American Association for the Cure of Inebriates (AACI) in 1870 and the formal beginning of National Prohibition in 1920.	1
Tracy takes as her point of departure the post-Prohibition formulation of Yale University physiologist E. M. Jellinek and others that alcoholism should be described and treated as a disease, in opposition to traditional thinking that perpetual drunkenness was a reflection of flawed character. Tracy argues that Jellinek's disease construction, which began to be articulated in the 1940s and still dominates alcohol treatment today, was actually not all that new. Rather, the AACI, back in the 1870s, was a leader in "[d]efining intemperance as a disease," which the author calls "an essential step in the early campaign to medicalize the condition." (p. 26). She goes on to show, rather convincingly through an impressive array of evidence, that the disease concept was taking firm hold well before National Prohibition presented the false hope that drinking problems would forever cease to exist.	. . .

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