Diseased cravings and paralysed control : dipsomania, morphinomania, chloralism, cocainism / by T.S. Clouston.

  • Clouston, T. S. (Thomas Smith), 1840-1915.
Date:
[1890]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Diseased cravings and paralysed control : dipsomania, morphinomania, chloralism, cocainism / by T.S. Clouston. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    [FEB. those who knew him intimately he had certain mental peculiarities. He was untruthful if telling the truth meant risk; he was vain, and had no power of self-denial, wanting in a high sense of duty, and mean. But he was educated for a profession, and developed no drinking tendencies till he went to a university town to live in lodgings during his education. Within two years, and before he was 19, he was found to be a confirmed and uncontrolled drunkard, utterly lost to affection and honour, indescribably untruthful, vicious with women, and a useless burden on society, which he remained till his death, ten years afterwards. From the time he got to like drink he showed no redeeming point, no let-up at any time, no trace of control over his craving, and no single point in his mental or moral nature that could be got hold of to apply any kind of motive to. I was satisfied, from a careful study of the case, that he was quite irresponsible and hopeless in the conditions of our modern society, and in the present state of the law. It no doubt began in vice, but within a year or so vice had become disease. It was not a long course of nerve degenera- tion, caused by years of drink soaking, but a sudden destruction of inhibition by a few months of drinking in the case of a brain that was innately weak in inhibitory qualities, and so unstable that it was very soon entirely overset. But supposing he had never begun drinking ? or after a few months had been placed where no drink could have been obtained, and a healthy industrious life led for a couple of years ? In that case I think he might have developed into full manhood, when the risk would have been much less, able to do some suitable work under good example, and not a curse to all who had to do with him. It was during the development of adolescence that the great danger lay. There was no doubt a short time during which this control was not lost and the craving not diseased; but this initial period of drinking as a vice was so short, and the amount of drinking was then so entirely inadequate to cause real brain damage, that we must look to the innate quality of the brain for the explanation of the facts. In normal brains with reasonably good health, we do not find a short period of dissipation followed by complete breakdown in the whole controlling power and moral sense, in the total destruction of what, from an evolutional point of view, it had taken hundreds of generations to create and upbuild. Therefore such cases should be looked on from the pathological rather than from the ethical point of view. I have seen several examples of young men becoming dipsomaniacs during adolescence whose mothers had been neurotic periodic dipsomaniacs. The dipsomania of the retrogressive periods of life, which are usually accentuated at the climacteric and senility, is not so common as at adolescence, but is far from being rare. Few prac- titioners but have met with cases of women who had led sober, self-controlled lives up to the menopause, and then took to alcohol to counteract the feeling of weakness and lack of energy and ol en-