Alcohol abuse has long been a concern of moralists and ministers, but beginning in the late 18th century heavy drinking increasingly became a medical concern. Well-known and influential early Americans such as philanthropist Anthony Benezet (1713-1784) and physician Benjamin Rush (1746-1813) wrote extensively on both the moral and physical dangers of habitual drunkenness. Benezet noted the toxicity of alcohol and the tendency of the drinker to increase consumption over time. Rush charted the progress from light drinking to chronic drunkenness, which he called “a moral derangement.” Beginning in 1815, antebellum doctors also identified a virulent and deadly form of insanity among habitual drunkards, which they termed delirium tremens. Marked by vivid hallucinations, delirium tremens became a common diagnosis in hospitals in the 1820s, and physicians had created an extensive medical literature on it by the Civil War. This month we added a 483-page volume entitled The Horrors of Delirium Tremens (New York, 1844), written by a little-known ex-inebriate named James Root. In the book, Root narrates his own experiences with delirium tremens and rails against physicians who believe they have a cure. Root denies that the phenomenon is a disease at all.
Matthew Osborn, one of two Albert M. Greenfield Foundation Dissertation Fellows, who is nearing the end of a year at the Library Company, brought the text to our attention. He noted that we already had a 19-page pamphlet, Jefferson Brick vs. Delirium Tremens, in which James Root rebukes the publisher of the New York City newspaper the Commercial Advertiser for not publishing a review of The Horrors of Delirium Tremens -- but we did not have a copy of the book itself. The text of the review (mysteriously signed A.B.) appears in the pamphlet. The reviewer writes, “If true, the work is a positive revelation of the spiritual world.” This is the gist of Root’s argument. While experiencing delirium tremens, Root (a man of the Enlightenment) was visited by devils and Satan himself. After a harrowing struggle, he had a spiritual breakthrough and realized that Satan was not his savior. For him, the whole terrifying experience served to confirm the existence of heaven, hell, God, and Satan. Root published the volume as prima facie evidence of their existence, for the salvation of all religious skeptics. In the words of the reviewer, “If [Root’s account is] not true, still the problem is to be solved, how a man of intelligence, and capable of writing such a book as this, should be fully and immovably persuaded that the demons that tormented him were real bona fide spirits of hell.”
Root’s point is that many sufferers of delirium tremens have reported being tormented by devils, and “these declarations are always considered as full proof that the men are deranged,” but his testimony as an intelligent, articulate writer should be “more than sufficient to make any sceptic [sic] change his belief respecting the non-existence of devils.” Root’s book is not illustrated, but he does describe the devils around his bed fairly graphically: “Their color was light grey, and their forms were something like that of a bear, though they were not large, yet their appearance was ugly, and they seemed to be waiting for me to arise.” Perhaps Root saw the same devils that appear in an engraving entitled “The Rum Maniac; or, Delirium Tremens” from the Almanac of the American Temperance Union, for 1843 (New York, 1842). The little devils do look a bit like bears!
Image: From the Almanac of the American Temperance Union, for 1843 (New York, 1842).
