Drinkers, drunkards and dipsomaniacs. Alcohol, doctors and class in Belgium, 1850-1914

Drunkenness was always a profoundly ambiguous state and different ways of drinking too much and more importantly, different members of society getting drunk, warranted separate explanations of the problem. Through the construction of 'the drunkard', boundaries delineating normal and acceptable behaviour were challenged and renegotiated. This thesis considers how the preoccupation with excessive drinking and its shifting interpretations revealed wider social and political concerns in a period of profound social change in Belgium from the mid-nineteenth century towards the First World War. Those... Mehr ...