ALCOHOLISM AND DEGENERATION IN DUTCH MEDICINE AROUND 1900

Baudelaire once wrote, 'sin is seductive and should be presented as such'. However, in nineteenth-century medico-psychiatric and public discourses on drunkenness and alcoholism, the reverse was attempted. While the fin de siècle disciples of Baudelaire in France and elsewhere embraced the experience of Dionysian ecstasy and inebriety, the use of alcohol had become the subject of growing public anxiety and discussions about its degenerative effects. Bv 1900, alcoholism was widely regarded as one of the 'three greatest plagues ' of the time. As L. Rénon taught his students at the medical faculty in Paris, alcoholism shared this epitaph with tuberculosis and svphilis.1 Furthermore, the social misery associated with the use of alcohol was considered to play a major role in intensifying the vwo other plagues. The Dutch public health official, hygienist and leading figure in the temperance movement W.P. Ruijsch concluded in 1904 that alcoholism was Public Enemy No. 1.2 In this he echoed the opinion of the public health manual of L. Ali Cohen, written 30 years earlier, that jenever ['gin'] was the main cause of the misery of the Dutch people.3 In the medical discourses on alcoholism and its nefarious effects, a central theme was degeneration and the role of heredity.4 But how did the language of degeneration, heredity and evolution inform these discourses? Van der Stel's pioneering study of the temperance movement and the care of alcoholics in the Netherlands suggests that medical theories on degeneration were rather pessimistic in nature regarding the prospect of a cure for alcoholism. This is said to have had two effects. On the one hand, it supported the position of the extremists within the temperance movement, who aimed at total abstinence. But, on the other hand. it is also supposed to have pave