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.

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    or pregnant. She made many resolves to abstain, but seldom could do so for more than three months at a time. When she once tasted spirits she could not stop. Everything was tried—voyages in teetotal ships round the world, voluntary residence in asylums, but nothing availed, and she died of some intercurrent disease after having ruined her constitution by drinking. A careful study of her brain state convinced me that she had a very neurotic constitution, that she had never been able to control herself from indulging in what she liked well, and that the effects of alcohol on her brain were intensely pleasurable, and that within two years after having begun the habit she was utterly helpless to restrain her craving for brandy, and was therefore in a condition of disease and not of vice. I have known several cases of neurasthenia take to stimulants as an antidote to their bad feelings, and very soon lose control over the cravings thus set up. In the neurotic dipsomaniacs it is the morbid intensity of the pleasure felt from drink that cannot be resisted. Their very strong point of keen sensibility is the rock that shipwrecks them. With their brain protoplasm alcohol has an especial affinity. They take to opium, to cocaine, to gambling, and to exciting em- ployment to excess, all for the same reason, their over-sensitiveness. They are mostly thin and have not too good digestion. When they become teetotalers they are rabid anti-drinkers, with no charity at all to those who can drink in moderation. One does not despair of the cure of a neurotic drunkard if abstinence can be enforced in time. Many such people have very strong volitional and inhibitory powers. They are not the facile fools not worth trying to save. 3. By “Somatic dipsomania” I would distinguish those cases where traumatism, sunstroke, paralysis, brain erysipelas, brain lesions of all sorts, so weaken the self control, that men who had previously led sober lives then acquire marked cravings for liquors and cannot control those cravings. I have seen examples of every one of these lesions inducing dipsomania as one of their symptoms,—indeed, I have known several cases where falls and blows on the head and sunstroke induced it as the only mental symptom. Under this category, also, come these cases where the craving appears after losses of blood, after severe illnesses, during con- ditions of anaemia and chlorosis in women after childbirth, during lactation, and during pregnancy. Usually there is not’only a craving for drink, but not much tolerance of it. A small quantity excites and intoxicates or stupefies in such cases. A small amount will sometimes cause violent delirium, and the traumatic and sun- stroke cases show homicidal and suicidal impulses soon passing into actual delusional or impulsive insanity. All those are very hopeless varieties except the anaemic, chlorotic, and nerve ex- hausted varieties. Nourish and fatten such cases, and they will often get well. J