Attachment Files

E.M. Jellinek and All That! A Brief Look Back at the Origins of Post-Repeal Alcohol Science in the United States

Chart - Addiction and Recovery - The Jellenek Curve

Summary/Abstract

A Historical Review of Alcohol Science in the United States and the contributions of E.M. Jellinek.

Content

American alcohol science was effectively reborn in the 1930s -- as it happened, the same decade Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) was born. Unlike AA, however -- which in due course gave rise to an enormous historical literature -- alcohol science has attracted little historical interest. "Why?" is a good question. I wonder if the sixty-plus-year period that has passed since the post-Repeal origins of modern alcohol science is long enough that some of us -- perhaps especially younger researchers -- may take the alcohol science tradition for granted and tend to assume (if and when the matter is given any thought at all) that, like death and taxes, the institution has always been there. That would be quite incorrect, of course. Pre-prohibition and 19th-century traditions of alcohol research and alcoholism treatment were virtually wiped out by the 18th or prohibition Amendment's passage -- save for pockets of polemically oriented scientific work cultivated by the Dry and Wet sides in the great battle for Repeal. A mainstream alcohol science tradition did not exist in the U.S. in 1930, and it would take years -- how many is another interesting question -- for alcohol science to secure a position as one of the two leading institutions in American society (the other was AA) respecting informed opinion on alcohol-related issues. This by now enduring alcohol science institution and tradition did not simply happen on the scene. As a professor of mine at Berkeley used to say, "History doesn't just happen, somebody somewhere has to do something!" And so what I'd like to recount to you today is a glimpse of some of the somebodies in the story (some familiar and others less so), some of the somethings they did, and, finally, some of the context in which they strived to launch a new scientific pursuit in post-Repeal America. See Attached PDF for entire article