September 1944

SCIENTIST DISCUSSES 2 POINTS RAISED BY WYLIE’S ARTICLE

Point 1: The present scientific view of the Point 2: Anthropologists have recognized may arise from many causes, and connection between epilepsy and for some years that neuroses and because it may sometimes arise only in alcoholism may be stated briefly as psychoses are not the same the world part of the population, alcoholism too follows: over. They vary according to cultural must appear in many forms. Whatever 1. There is a much greater patterns. In many primitive societies the may be said about the variation of percentage of excessive drinkers among young man who is being initiated into alcoholism in the course of human epileptics than among the general men’s society is expected to have visions history, the fact remains that, at any time, population. at the time of initiation ceremonies. In our any form and motivation may be found in 2. The use of alcohol even in culture, a vision at any time would be the individual case. The historical trend moderate amounts aggravates epilepsy. regarded as an indication that the person means only that the majority behaves in 3. There are persons who have in question must be considered in line for a given way, but it does not mean that latent epilepsy. They may have inherited the mental hospital. each and every individual of society a constitution which is liable to epilepsy. The forms which alcoholism takes on, behaves in that way. At any time there is In such persons, epilepsy may be and the drives behind alcoholism, vary much individual variation. There is released only by some precipitating not only among different cultural patterns nothing in this problem which would factor. Such a precipitating factor is but also within a given culture, as that permit of simplifications. excessive drinking. culture becomes modified in time. In he EM. Je/fhnek 4. There are persons who acquire first half of the 19th century, alcoholism Director: Section on Alcohol Studies, Yale a nerve injury which predisposes them to was mainly a problem of the craftsman University. convulsions which resemble epilepsy. In who had been crowded out by machines. these persons, too, the excessive and In the 16th century, on the other hand, sometimes even the moderate use of alcoholism was much more prevalent in alcohol may activate this predisposition. the higher than in the lower social 5. Since active as well as latent classes. The drunkenness of the ancient epileptics and persons with nerve injuries Roman aristocracy had the function of as mentioned above, are blacking out the boredom of an overbred temperamentally liable to excessive people who could not find any thrill in the drinking, it follows that convulsions may ordinary pleasures of life. At other times, be observed in a fair number of people drank a vague, indefinablefeeling excessive drinkers. of insecurity away, as for instance at the 6. Alcohol cannot cause epilepsy. time that Nazism began to threaten the But, as said before, it can either world. aggravate the condition or precipitate the But varied as the origins and forms of latent condition which perhaps would not drunkenness may have been, they were have been provoked by other means. always due to tension. Because tension