My doctoral research seeks to better understand how social and medical elites cooperated to problematize intoxication, construct concepts of addiction, and inspire temperance ideologies that terminated in Prohibition and continue to underpin a disastrous global War on Drugs. 

More specifically, in my dissertation, I focus on the construction of a medico-legal concept of habitual drunkenness in nineteenth-century America. If a civil court determined that an individual was a habitual drunkard, the defendant was assigned a guardian and lost control over his property, a basic cornerstone of citizenship in the new republic. Such a determination could also invalidate a life insurance policy, an instrument that offered the promise of middle-class financial security in a turbulent marketplace. Judicial actors in specific cases—which included petitioners, judges, jurors, witnesses, and the alleged drunkards—often utilized a combination of medical understanding and temperance ideology. 

As these cases articulated a medico-legal concept of habitual drunkenness, the courtroom became an arena in which public and private actors harnessed the punitive capacity of civil law to sanction drinking at a time when the future of coercive public measures like prohibition was very much uncertain. The ways in which medicine, temperance, business, and law work together to curb the civil rights of drinkers during the nineteenth century reveals the origins of a tension between the impulse to treat addiction as a disease or punish the addict that endures in the present day.