Rum Maniacs: Alcoholic Insanity in the Early American Republic

A cultural history that reveals how and why pathological drinking became a subject of medical interest, social controversy, and lurid fascination in the early American republic.

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.

In Rum Maniacs, M...