Drinkers, Drunkards, and Degenerates: The Alcoholic Population
of a Parisian Asylum, 1867-1914
Authors
Patricia E. Prestwich
Abstract
The medicalization of alcoholism by the psychiatrie profession in the latter decades
of the nineteenth century can be considered an important factor in the expanding
power ofthe psychiatric profession in France. Yet the relationship between alcoholism
and psychiatry has always been ambivalent. An extensive debate among French
psychiatrists in the 1890s over the treatment of alcoholic mental patients reveals
their desire to narrow the definition of alcoholism in order to restrict their clientele.
These debates suggest that medicalization is a complex process that can involve the
rejection as well as the appropriation of expertise.
