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.

    14/46 (page 702)
    DR T. S. CLOUSTON ON [FEB. any cause, some of whom are very subject to such a loss of control over their craving for stimulants that it can only he called diseased if they have once taken to their use as “restoratives.” Few of us but have known some examples of such persons. They need not have any insane heredity, or any connexion with technical insanity in any degree, or they may be of the insane diathesis. Suppose we take the poet Edgar Allan Poe as an example of the latter class. To some such persons the effect of alcoholic stimu- lants or opium is so intensely pleasant, and so reinvigorating at flie time, that it is no wonder they are craved. They are lifted from a common state of mind into an ideal one. Their social instincts are greatly intensified by drink. To them it is a mental stimulant in a true sense. In some of them there is a periodic depression nearly allied to simple melancholia that is accompanied by a special craving for some external agent that will give enjoy- ment. In women of this type, the nervous accompaniments of menstruation, pregnancy, and nursing are especially apt to lead to a craving for stimulants. But it must be kept in mind, and it has certainly often been forgotten by writers on inebriety, that there are two varieties of periodicity in the drink craving quite distinct from each other: the one is when it comes on per se, and is a true recurrence of a subjective nervous phenomenon, a true cyclical neurosis. The other is when there are “bouts” of drinking that upset the stomach and liver, and produce a thorough satiation of the tissues with alcohol, which can no longer be taken, therefore, without producing a revulsion. When the organs and tissues become freed of those poisonous effects, and can with impunity receive more alcohol, then the man begins another “ bout.” This, which is more common than true periodicity, I do not call a periodicity at all. There would always be a mental desire for drink in such cases, but the body will not tolerate it for a time after a drenching. Whenever toleration is established excess begins. The following was an example of a neurotic dipsomaniac. H. I., a lady of good education with a distinctly nervous heredity, but with no insanity in her ancestry. Was a brilliant, social, rather jealous, and very attractive girl. She was tall, thin, mobile, and highly neurotic in temperament. She married soon, and the change of habits, the responsibilities, the child-bearing, and the desire to appear lively and entertaining to her husband, made her use wine at first and then spirits. When she was tired the effect of alcohol was always delicious to her. It dissipated any feeling of fatigue, raised her spirits, enabled her to appear well in company, and to do her work, as she thought. In two years after marriage she had begun to take it secretly, and she found she “ needed” it, and she accordingly took more and more strong spirits until it mastered her, and she became its utter slave. She lost all power of control- ling her craving, and constantly lost her truthfulness, but she was not entirely demoralized. She was always worse when menstruating