Rum Maniacs

Edgar Allan Poe once described, in a vivid account, being locked in a cell and terrified as he watched men tear apart his mother's corpse. The scene was never real. It was one of the many hallucinations the poet experienced as a result of his drinking. Matthew Warner Osborn traces how compulsive drinking came to be studied by doctors, debated in public, and gawked at by ordinary people in the early American republic.

The book centers on delirium tremens, the condition Poe suffered from. Doctors first identified it in 1813, and its signature hallucinations pushed the medical profession to rethink how it understood and treated alcohol abuse. Drawing on emerging ideas about anatomy, physiology, and mental illness, this new diagnosis helped establish the view, held by physicians and the public alike, that heavy habitual drinking could be a mental and bodily disease.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, delirium tremens had become a source of material for theater, poetry, fiction, and illustration. That fascination carried into the twentieth century, as seen in Disney's animated film Dumbo, where a drunken young elephant is tormented by a band of pink elephants. Rum Maniacs shows how delirium tremens helped shape the modern understanding of addiction as an inner battle against torment.