General Conclusion

As Mary Shelley writes, “Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.” Whether taken from the perspective of biological essentialism or from the perspective of social constructionism, the history of proto-addiction discourse has been massively overlooked. If addiction existed as a physiological reality for people before modern medical articulations of the phenomenon, then there is evidence to be found of sufferers’ and observers’ attempts to understand and articulate their own experiences of it. If addiction was “invented” in the nineteenth century, then it was not invented wholesale, and the roots of the conceptual components which coalesced out of the “chaos” of the past to form our modern disease models are worth exploring. It seems, then, impossible to pick a single moment in history as the point of inception of addiction. Realigning the accepted historiography, however, takes time. Scholars such as Deborah Willis and Rebecca Lemon have been making the case for early modern addictions for some time now. A recent thematic edition of English Language Notes shows that Lemon and others are still pushing back against the persistent notion that 1800 marked “a watershed moment in the ‘discovery’ of addiction.” Lemon introduces this collection by explaining that the “first section, ‘Early Addictions,’ offers three essays that challenge the modern historical boundaries of addiction.” The “Early Addictions” covered in this latest collection offer a welcome continuation in the shift away from considering the nineteenth century as the “watershed moment in the ‘discovery’ of addiction.” Early is, however, a relative term, and the arguments raised by the authors of the essays do not need to be limited to a focus on the early modern period. The pace of the realignment of the historiography of addiction can seem glacial, but at least it is moving in the right direction.