An Essay, Medical, Philosophical, and Chemical on Drunkenness and its Effects on the Human Body

By the mid-nineteenth century, ‘alcoholism’ was named as the disease of habitual drunkenness. Possibly the most important book to predict this was Trotter’s Essay, written in 1804. _x000D_ Originally published in 1988 as part of the Tavistock Classics in the History of Psychiatry series, Roy Porter’s Introduction to this facsimile reprint locates Trotter’s work within the wider history of the evolution of the idea of alcoholism. It also examines the Essay in the context of Trotter’s own life and mind – a mind preoccupied with what he saw as the degenerative tendencies of modern civilization and with the wider issues of drug dependence.