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By Sarah W. Tracy
384 pp, $23.50
Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007
ISBN-13: 978-0-8018-8620-1

JAMA. 2008;299(14):1726-1727.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Alcoholism in America: From Reconstruction to Prohibition is not exactly a history of alcoholism in the Gilded and Progressive Eras, as the title might seem to imply. It does, however, provide its readers with an excellent analysis of the ideas about and various methods for treatment of alcoholism as a disease. The author, Sarah W. Tracy, begins by examining the development of various concepts of alcoholism (often called intemperance, dipsomania, or inebriety) as a disease. She then dissects the various ways in which the disease concept was "framed" or imagined in the broader cultural sense; how it interacted with and was influenced by other ideas and trends of the time; and how the view of habitual drunkenness as a vice continued to inform and complicate thinking about the causes and cures of alcoholism. The remainder of the text investigates the period's efforts to treat alcoholism in an institutional setting through . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Peter McCandless, PhD, Reviewer
Department of History
College of Charleston
Charleston, South Carolina
mccandlessp@cofc.edu