The Society for the Study of Addiction 1884–1988

Virginia Berridge notes that, "the history of institutions and organizations has, by and large, had a bad press." Consequently, revisionist social historians have either given up writing about institutions or turned to writing chronicles of "total institutions". Well aware of the hazards of the enterprise, Berridge has taken up the challenge of writing a balanced and judicious history of the Society for the Study of Addiction. She has succeeded masterfully. Using manuscripts and interviews she presents a series of sketches focused on successive periods of the Society's existence. In each she weaves together details about the day-today operation of the Society, biographical portraits of its leaders, and synopses of important articles in its journal. The Society, as Berridge portrays it, has been a loose grouping of individuals from many backgrounds, though generally including a large number of doctors. Throughout much of its history it has had large and poorly-focused ambitions. Characteristically its ambitions greatly exceeded its accomplishments, which have been quite modest. Indeed the Society was often so fragile that simply maintaining its existence was a considerable achievement. This was accomplished through the efforts of a succession of strong leaders, whose views tended to dominate the society's agenda. What gives this work its greatest value for the general reader is Berridge's ability to draw on her thorough knowledge of the history of addiction in order to relate the history of the Society to changing attitudes and government policies. By showing how the society reacted to these trends and struggled (usually unsuccessfully) to influence them, Berridge has managed to give us not merely another institutional history but a social history of addiction from a particular angle of vision. This book starts off well. The contents list is interesting and along the lines of a Jules Verne novel-"Part 1 In which we discover.. .". The Preface poses the many questions which enter one's mind when one stops to think about the origins of tomography. But are they all truthfully answered in the book? Many of them are, but not all. The early history from 1914 to 1940 is beautifully done and collected together and the interested reader will find this fascinating, with portraits of the really early pioneers, as well as diagrams showing their methods. Europe and Britain seem to be well reported here. The years of consolidation of classical tomography, 1940-1950, seem less well done: Watson of U.K. seems to be …