“They are no angels even when sober, but turn into beasts when they are drunk ”

The Problem of Alcoholism and the Reception of the Theory of Progressive Degeneration in Slovenia at the End of the 19th and the Beginning of the 20th century

Abstract

The author presents the process of the rise of alcoholism in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the era of citizenry, alcohol became a drug that spread among the people, and it was in particular the march of the “poisonous” spirits that took frightening proportions. Alcoholism as a social disease threatened both the corporal and mental health of individuals and the entire nation. With excessive drinking, the drunkards particularly destroyed their brains, and their drinking also posed a threat to their progeny; their offspring apparently would become even worse, even more lethargic, low-spirited and degenerate. Doctor Fran Viljem Lipič was already concerned about the noxiousness of alcohol in the 1830s, while in the second half of the 19th century, it was Morel’s theory of progressive degeneration that gained more and more followers. Professor Richard von Krafft-Ebing made it particularly popular among Austrian psychiatrists, and the theory was also advocated in the essays on alcoholism and insanity by the psychiatrists Ivan Robida and Fran Goestl. In the more serious cases, chronic alcoholism was believed to lead to moral degeneration and alcohol depravity. Thus, the saddest consequence of alcoholism was an ethical and moral degeneration of the drunkards, which developed alongside the decay of the mind and the heart. Alcoholism was believed to be particularly pernicious to the offspring, who were considered even more degenerate and psychically inferior. It was believed that parents who were alcoholics would also have alcoholic children; i.e. evil led to more evil. At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, alcoholism finally became a disease, and its ill effects were sought at the core of social reproduction and family life. A typical alcoholic-degenerate was thus believed to be imprinted with mental degeneration from the outset, and was also partly responsible for the poisoning and increased weakening of future generations.