PETER,

When I was working on the papers of Edward Turner, founder of the New York State Inebriate Asylum -- see the history of this institution coauthored by me and Bill White (Drunkard's Refuge, Umass Press, 2004 - I noticed in a formal paper on the nature of inebriation that Turner had gone back over the manuscript and substituted dipsomania for inebriation.  I've forgotten the date of this paper (but post-Civil War), but it suggests that this particular mania came into scientific use at a particular historical moment, one that might be precisely identified.  Monomania is the term Melville uses to characterize Ahab in Moby-Dick (1851).  Surely, manias followed the radical shift in psychological understanding the nineteenth century from Scottish Common Sense Philosophy to dynamic psychology.  See the monumental history of this shift in Henri Ellenberger's The Discovery of the Unconscious. Thomas Cooley's relatively recent book, titled something like The Ivory Leg and the Ebony Cabinet (others will repair my faulty memory on this), does a great job of rereading the canonical mid-nineteenth American writers in the context of the psychology that actually dominated their times and imaginations, i.e. The Scottish one, rather than the pre-Freudian one that is usually and anachronistically applied by literary critics.  I have, of course, ignored here your specific inquiry about problematic gambling, but what you seem to have found is another instance of the Victorian compromise on free will vs. determinism in the understanding of these mania: a common topic among historians. See our summary version in Drunkard's Refuge.
Perhaps the inclusion of gambling prefigures the similar inclusion of gambling under the 20th-century disease model, in which there is purportedly an addiction to adrenalin behind addictive gambling that qualifies it as a disease rather than a vice.  John W. Crowley, U of Alabama


On 1/14/10 4:56 AM, "Peter Ferentzy" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Greetings All,

I'm wondering if anyone can recall an instance of problematic gambling addressed as a subset of "volitional monomania" in the 19th century. In popular writings, problem gambling was often referred to as a "mania", and I was just wondering if science had addressed this at all prior to the 20th century.

Thanks


Peter