Hello, Cheryl:
   Jessica Warner has certainly given you a good start.  Other things you
may want to look at:
 
A.E. Wilkerson, A History of the Concept of Alcoholism as a Disease,
D.S.W. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1966.  (it's been long
since I looked at this, and it's undoubtedly dated)
 
Items on the INSTITUTIONAL history of disease concepts:
 
Jim Baumohl and Robin Room, Inebriety, doctors and the state: alcoholism
treatment institutions before 1940, Recent Devopments in Alcoholism
5:135-174, 1987 (ed. M. Galanter; NY: Plenum).
 
thematic issue of Contemporary Drug Problems on "historical
perspectives on the treatment of response to alcohol problems: case
studies in six societies", 13: 387-583, 1986.
 
there are a couple of other papers on inebriate reformatories etc. in a
special issue of Drogalkohol (Lausanne) on the theme, "Zur
Sozialgeschichte des Alkohols in der Neuzeit Europas", 3/86: 143-283,
1986. (one article in English and all with English summaries).  Also the
papers in part 3 of Susanna Barrows and Robin Room, eds., Drinking:
Behavior and Belief in Modern History. Berkeley, etc.: University of
California Press, 1991.
 
Other items, not necessarily within the confines of history, but relevant
anyway:
   John Booth Davies, The Myth of Addiction: An Application of the
Psychological Theory of Attribution to Illicit Drug Use. Chur, Philadelphia,
etc.: Harwood (from the psychological tradition of resistance to the
concept)
   Herbert Fingarette, Heavy Drinking: The Myth of Alcoholism as a
Disease. Berkeley, etc.: University of California Press, 1988. (a legal
philosopher's critique)
   Pertti Alasuutari, Desire and Craving: A Cultural Theory of Alcoholism.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. (interpretative
sociology)
   Jukka-Pekka Takala, The concept of control between scientific and
everyday uses, pp. 7-24 in: Fanny Duckert et al., eds., Perspectives on
Controlled Drinking. Helsinki: NAD Publication No. 17, 1989. [Nordic
Alcohol and Drug Council] (criminologist; see other papers in this book
too)
   Robin Room, Drugs, consciousness and self-control: popular and
medical conceptions, International Review Journal of Psychiatry 1:63-70,
1989.(modern medical conceptions viewed in the light of historical
interpretation)
   Robin Room, Sociological aspects of the disease concept of
alcoholism, Research Advances in Alcohol and Drug Problems 7:47-91
(ed. R.G. Smart et al., New York: Plenum)(sociologists' resistance to the
disease concept in recent history)
   Ron Roizen, The American Discovery of Alcoholism, 1933-1939. Ph.D.
dissertation, sociology, University of California, Berkeley, 1991.
 
 
Keep us posted on progress.  Good luck, Robin Room ([log in to unmask])