New article in Addiction

 

We are delighted to announce a new article was pre-released on 22 December 2024 from the Women and Alcohol project in Addiction: 

Iain Smith and Pam Lock, How did investigations into spontaneous human combustion influence alcohol medicine? An examination of the medical and literary discussions that brought the two together

This interdisciplinary collaboration between psychiatrist and historian Dr Smith, and literary scholar, Dr Lock, has resulted in an article for the humanities section of Addiction. We examined 57 'real' medical cases of Spontaneous Human Combustion (SHC), and the representation of SHC in ten novels and a selection of short stories. We were intrigued by the fact that a large proportion of medical writings on alcohol in the 19th Century contained a chaper or section on SHC and that the majority of medical cases shared featured women as the victims. We concluded that the development of new theories about the action of alcohol on the body and mind appears to have been influenced by the now-discredited eighteenth- and nineteenth-century idea that the phenomenon of human combustion, spontaneous or not, was linked to spirit drinking. As an extreme example of the consequences of heavy drinking, spontaneous human combustion was used to underpin early theories on the clinical chemistry of alcohol.

This article is open access and can be found at https://doi-org.bris.idm.oclc.org/10.1111/add.16739