The first serious medical considerations of the problem of inebriety,
as it was then called, came in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Two famous writings addressed the problem in what seemed to
be a new light. Although their work on the physical aspects of alcohol
became fodder for the temperance zealots, both Dr. Benjamin Rush
and Dr. Thomas Trotter seriously considered the effects of alcohol in
a scientific way. Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence
and the first surgeon general,
