Citation

Handley-Cousins S. J. Early Repub. 2022; 42(3): 496-499.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2022, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, Publisher University of Pennsylvania Press)

DOI

10.1353/jer.2022.0062

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

One of the most famous images of the American Temperance movement is "The Drunkard's Progress," which depicts the nine stages of alcohol's influence on men, proceeding inexorably from the innocent "glass with a friend" to death by suicide. Just one step back from this tragic end, however, was another inevitable outcome of drinking: "desperation and crime," accompanied by an image of a menacing character holding a gun to a man's throat. Nineteenth-century Americans believed that the wages of drinking was not just dissipation, but violent crime. Yet, the relationship between alcohol consumption, violent crime, and culpability was not clear-cut. Did drinkers have the capacity to understand the gravity of the crimes they committed? Should they be held responsible for crimes committed when they were under the influence?

These are the questions that Michele Rotunda explores in her new monograph, A Drunkard's Defense: Alcohol, Murder, and Medical Jurisprudence in Nineteenth Century America. As both Temperance and the medical profession grew over the course of the century, Rotunda demonstrates that murder trials became a site for debate about the role that alcohol and drinking played in criminality and culpability. While "drunkenness was no excuse for crime" in the early nineteenth century, that rigid rule frayed over the ensuing decades, resulting by the end of the century in legal theories similar to today's concept of "diminished capacity".

Rotunda convincingly posits that murder cases offer a useful window into the tangled cultural, medical, and legal ideas about alcohol and violent crime. Weaving together court documents, trial testimonies, sensational newspaper reports, fictional accounts, and medical literature, Rotunda balances the salacious with the intellectual for a highly readable book. Her sources are plentiful, but more importantly, they provide a wide variety of perspectives--from criminals to judges, doctors to Temperance activists, the exploitative press to Edgar Allan Poe. The result is a text that ably explores the tangled intersections of law, medicine, and alcohol use...

Language: en

Keywords

Alcoholism; Legal history; Medical history; Murder; Temperance