Dipsomania is an uncontrollable craving for what?
Dipsomania Dipsomania Dipsomania is a historical term describing a medical condition involving an uncontrollable craving for alcohol. In the 19th century, the term dipsomania was used to refer to a variety of alcohol-related problems, most of which are known today as alcoholism. Dipsomania is occasionally still used to describe a particular condition of periodic, compulsive bouts of alcohol intake. The idea of dipsomania is important for its historical role in promoting a disease theory of chronic drunkenness. The word comes from Greek "dipso" (= thirst) and "mania". It is still mentioned in the WHO ICD-10 classification as an alternative description for
Dipsomania professionals and reformers to change attitudes about habitual drunkenness from being a criminally punishable vice to being a medically treatable disease. As historian Roy MacLeod wrote about this dipsomania reform movement, it "illuminates certain features of the gradual transformation taking place in national attitudes towards the prevention and cure of social illnesses during the last quarter of the 19th century." Although "dipsomania" was used in a variety of somewhat contradictory ways by different individuals, by the late 19th century the term was usually used to describe a periodic or acute condition, in contrast to chronic drunkenness. In his 1893 book