Governing Habitual Drunkards: Guardianship, Life Insurance, and the Medico-Legal History of Compulsive Drinking in Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract

During the nineteenth century, the habitual drunkard became a problematic kind of person who required medical and legal attention. Growing anxieties about compulsive drinking coalesced around the terminology of habitual drunkenness, a concept that captured the sense that alcohol caused compulsion. Religious temperance reformers, many of whom were physicians, defined habitual drunkenness as an artificial appetite, a physiological condition of habituation in which the drinker lost the physical capacity for control over drinking. Non-medical actors such as civil courts and life insurers also took up the quest to define, detect, and discipline the habitual drunkard. When intoxicated heads of households neglected their families and estates, civil courts placed them under guardianship, a legal status that recognized habitual drunkenness as a form of mental incapacity. Guardianship also abridged the habitual drunkard’s property and contract rights. In a parallel vein, life insurers sought to avoid insuring habitual drunkards through medical screening and the inclusion of temperance clauses into their policy contracts. Both courts and life insurers worked to apply generalized definitions of habitual drunkenness to specific individuals before them. In both contexts, a combination of public and private actors navigated a complex combination of scientific and medical knowledge about alcohol, religious temperance ideologies about drunkenness as sin, and changing legal doctrine regarding mental capacity as they governed and disciplined compulsive drinkers. In the adjudication of guardianship cases and in life insurers’ quest to exclude drinkers, non-medical actors established habitual drunkenness as a serviceable—albeit contested, inchoate, and often ambiguous—medico-legal category.