Ardent spirits and republican medicine -- Discovering delirium tremens -- Hard drinking and want -- The benevolent empire of medicine -- The pathology of intemperance -- The drunkard's demons -- Epilogue: alcoholics and pink elephants
Summary
Edgar Allan Poe vividly recalls standing in a prison cell, fearing for his life, as he watched men mutilate and dismember the body of his mother. That memory, however graphic and horrifying, was not real. It was a hallucination, one of many suffered by the writer, caused by his addiction to alcohol. In Rum Maniacs, Matthew Warner Osborn reveals how and why pathological drinking became a subject of medical interest, social controversy, and lurid fascination in the early American republic. At the heart of that story is the disease that Poe suffered: delirium tremens and the "fantastic terrors" that characterize it
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 219-258) and index
Notes
Online resource; title from digital title page (ebray platform, viewed May 6, 2014)