Medicine: Puritans & Alcohol

What is the leading cause of alcoholism nowadays? Not the sordid living conditions that once led to "Gin Lane," say the editors of the British Medical Journal, but hangovers of old-fashioned Puritanism. "In Shakespeare's time," editorializes the Journal, "there were Puritans who condemned drinking out-and-out, and Falstaff is eloquently scornful of them: 'Nor a man cannot make him laugh; but that's no marvel, he drinks no wine.'

"Yet it is in the regions most dominated by the Puritan ethic that alcoholic excess appears most pronounced. Where the social group withdraws its approval from drinking, it becomes either a solitary vice or a wickedness covertly shared with a few boon companions. This type of alcoholism is allied not so much to poverty as to conflict within the personality. It is to be found in countries such as the U.S.A. and Sweden, which have experimented in prohibition. These two countries head the list . . . issued by the World Health Organization [last year] as having the highest proportional number of alcoholics—Italy, that great wine-drinking country, having the lowest . . .

"The WHO report gives a provisional figure (1,100 per 100,000 adults) for the proportional number of alcoholics in England and Wales, which is barely a quarter of the American figure. Enough of Sir John Falstaff may have lingered in our midst to mitigate the severity of the Nonconformist conscience and its characteristic personality conflicts."