Barrel Fever

Benjamin Franklin’s The Drinkers Dictionary, actually a thesaurus, contained several hundred words for drinkers, drinking, and intoxication – his head is full of bees; he’s cherubimical; he’s killed his dog; he’s got a brass eye; he’s got the glanders; he’s double-tongu’d; he’s half seas over; the King is his cousin, to mention a few.

My name is Anon., and I am a killer of dogs.

For what we now call alcoholism, however, there was only the word drunkenness.

The Washingtonians, an early society of alcoholics founded in Baltimore in 1840, referred to themselves as confirmed drinkers, drunkards, hard cases, inveterate cases, sots, tipplers, and inebriates.

My name is Anon., and I am a hard case.




The Swedish physician Magnus Huss – Alcoholismus Chronicus: A Contribution to the Study of Dyscrasias Based on my Personal Experience and the Experience of Others – sought to correct and replace the German term "methylism" with the new term “alcoholism.” This was half-way through the nineteenth century, but it wouldn’t catch on until the next one.

Dr. Norman S. Kerr, the English-speaking world’s addiction expert at the time, contended that the focal point of the compulsion was “the state of intoxication” rather than “the intoxicating agent.” In his 1865 book Inebriety, he made the pitch for intoxication mania or narcomania.

My name is Anon., and I am a narcomaniac.

Alcoholism would win out, but, in the interim, inebriety and dipsomania were the terms most frequently used. Others included habitual drunkenness, ebriosity, the liquor habit, and barrel fever.

Alcoholics, before they were alcoholics, were drunks, boozers, rumsuckers, stiffs, rummies, souses, and winos.

My name is Anon., and I am a rumsucker.