Table Of ContentRum Maniacs
Rum Maniacs
Alcoholic Insanity in the
Early American Republic
MATTHEW
WARNER OSBORN
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
Matthew Warner Osborn is assistant professor of history at the University of
Missouri–Kansas City.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2014 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2014.
Printed in the United States of America
23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-09989-7 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-09992-7 (e-book)
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226099927.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Osborn, Matthew Warner, author.
Rum maniacs : alcoholic insanity in the early American Republic / Matthew
Warner Osborn.
pages ; cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-226-09989-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-09992-7
(e-book) 1. Delirium tremens—United States—History—19th century.
2. Delirium tremens— Pennsylvania—Philadelphia—History—19th
century. 3. Delirium tremens—United States—Psychological aspects—
History—19th century. 4. Delirium tremens—Social aspects—United
States—History—19th century. 5. Temperance—United States—History—
19th century. I. Title.
RC526.O83 2014
362.292—dc23
2013025544
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992
(Permanence of Paper).
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments / vii
INTRODUCTION / 1
ONE / Ardent Spirits and Republican Medicine / 13
TWO / Discovering Delirium Tremens / 45
THREE / Hard Drinking and Want / 77
FOUR / The Benevolent Empire of Medicine / 107
FIVE / The Pathology of Intemperance / 137
SIX / The Drunkard’s Demons / 169
EPILOGUE / Alcoholics and Pink Elephants / 205
Notes / 219
Index / 259
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book benefi ted from the intellectual, fi nancial, and emotional gen-
erosity of many people. Karen Halttunen’s scholarship was an important
inspiration. From beginning to end, her mentoring and friendship proved
invaluable. Alan Taylor, David Henkin, Catherine Kudlick, and Daniel
Richter read drafts of the entire manuscript. Colleagues and friends took
time to offer suggestions, read chapters, and bear with my handwringing,
especially Aaron Wunsch, Amanda Moniz, Brad Cazden, Jessica Roney, Joe
Karten, Julie Kim, Justine Murrison, Robert Weiss, Rob Habberman, Tim
Yates, and Trisha Posey. Two anonymous readers for the University of Chi-
cago Press provided me with detailed and useful comments. Alice Bennett
smoothed many rough edges. Robert Devens offered patient encourage-
ment and sage advice through my prolonged revisions.
I have presented material from the manuscript in various formal and
informal venues and learned much from audience members. Bruce Dorsey,
Kyle Bulthuis, Kyle Volk, Pat Cohen, Renate Wilson, Ric Caric, Richard Bell,
Scott Martin, and William J. Rorabaugh participated with me on academic
panels that allowed me to test new ideas. For their invitations, I thank Mi-
chael Sappol and the National Library of Medicine, Daniel Richter and the
McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Clendening Library, and
Philadelphia’s Edgar Allan Poe House.
I received help from numerous archivists and librarians, especially Sta-
cey Peeples at the Pennsylvania Hospital Historical Collections; John Pol-
lack in the Rare Books and Manuscript Library at the University of Pennsyl-
vania; Roy Goodman and J. J. Ahern at the American Philosophical Society;
James Green, Cornelia King, and Wendy Woloson at the Library Company
of Philadelphia; Edward Mormon, then director of the Historical Medical
viii / Acknowledgments
Library at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia; and Carla Lillvik at
Harvard University’s Gutman Library.
Many people shared research and resources. Karla Kelling was enor-
mously generous in helping me with research into the Philadelphia Alms-
house. Sarah Knott and Ric Caric allowed me to cite their unpublished work.
The Magic Lantern Society of the United States and Canada responded to
a plea for help, and Terry Borton of the American Magic-Lantern Theater
shared slides from his private collection. I hope the little work I have done
here on the phantasmagoria will encourage scholarship on this fascinating
theatrical form.
Over the course of my research and writing, I met a number of people
who have suffered delirium tremens or witnessed the affl iction. I want to
thank the several who volunteered diffi cult memories for giving me some
insight into the lived experience of the disease.
I began this project while on a one-year fellowship from the Humani-
ties Institute at the University of California–Davis. A grant from the UCD
history department’s Roland Marchand Memorial Fund enabled me to
write an essay that received the Roy Porter Student Essay Prize from the
Society for the Social History of Medicine. That essay was subsequently
published in the society’s journal. The bulk of this research was funded
by three grants. I received a Barra Foundation Fellowship from the McNeil
Center for Early American Studies. The Library Company of Philadelphia
awarded me a Roy M. Greenfi eld Fellowship, and I spent a wonderful year
as a denizen of the Cassatt House. A research fellowship from the American
Philosophical Society enabled me to enjoy a snowy February in its beauti-
ful library. The UCD history department granted me two yearlong fellow-
ships that enabled me to complete an earlier version. During that time, I
adapted a portion of my research for publication in the Journal of the Early
Republic. That material makes up the bulk of chapter 3.
While I was revising the manuscript, Occidental College provided me
a safe harbor. Dolores Trevizo, Lisa Sousa, Lynn Dumenil, Sharla Fett, and
everyone in the history department offered me friendship and support. I
fi nished the book as a member of the history department at the University
of Missouri–Kansas City.
My mother, Becky Osborn Coolidge, and stepfather, John S. Coolidge,
always expressed a confi dence that I often sorely needed. Erin Merritt read
everything and offered limitless curiosity, belief, and intelligence. Our
young children, Paul and Imogen, often asked when my book would be
done. I am relieved to fi nally tell them that this particular one is fi nished.
INTRODUCTION
On a hot summer afternoon in 1849, Edgar Allan Poe appeared unexpect-
edly at the home of his friend John Sartain. Poe looked “pale and hag-
gard,” Sartain would later recount, with “a wild and frightened expression
in his eyes.” Convinced that murderers were pursuing him, Poe feverishly
described being thrown into Philadelphia’s Moyamensing Prison, where he
experienced bizarre hallucinations. From his cell, he saw a woman stand-
ing on top of the prison’s tower, “a young female brightly radiant, like silver
dipped in light.” She tried to entrap him with a series of questions, but Poe
steadfastly refused to answer. Soon after, a prison guard led him to a boil-
ing cauldron and insisted that he take a drink, but Poe resisted the guard’s
murderous intentions. The plot took a horrifying turn when Poe’s tormen-
tors dragged his mother before him and began to mutilate and dismember
her. Describing to Sartain the gruesome vision of his mother’s legs being
sawed off, Poe collapsed into a convulsion.1 After his recovery, Poe under-
stood his hallucinations and delusions to have been symptoms of a disease
caused by a bout of heavy drinking. He later referred to these experiences
in a letter to a close family member. “For more than ten days I was totally
deranged, although I was not drinking one drop,” he wrote. “During this
interval I imagined the most horrible calamities. . . . All was hallucination,
arising from . . . an attack of mania-a-potu.”2
Better known as delirium tremens, mania a potu was common in
nineteenth-century hospitals. The disease was also a subject of romantic
speculation. That Poe suffered from it was both tragic and eerily appropri-
ate, given the nature of his writing. Commenting on Poe’s experience, one
anonymous commentator noted that in his agitation, “the poet seemed a
personifi cation of his own ‘Raven.’”
Description: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.
