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ANY GENERAL history of psychiatry between, say, the Renaissance and the end of the nineteenth century would likely stress, among other things, the following two points. First, that during this period there was a growing acceptance, both within the medical community and among the general public, that certain behavioural patterns, and certain kinds of mental states, are the result of disease, and hence are the proper objects of medical description and treatment; this instead of the ascription of these queer ways of acting or thinking to such things as the possession by daemons, a state of sin or wilful criminality. Second, a growing acceptance, again among both physicians and laymen, that the mind is the function of the brain, that a phrase like "mental physiology" is not a contradiction in terms, and that while perhaps it is not equivalent to "cerebral physiology" the two processes are so closely linked that the one cannot be properly understood without reference to the other. This commitment received its fullest expression in the school of German somatic psychiatrists of the last half of the nineteenth century, the school of Griesinger, Meynert and

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SummaryMuch medical, psychiatric and social thinking in the second half of the nineteenth century was influenced by the concept of progressive hereditary degeneration most systematically formulated by the French psychiatrist B.A. Morel (1809–1873). Alcoholism was one of the conditions postulated by Morel as leading to direct hereditary consequences for the offspring. This essay examines the pervasiveness of hereditary degenerationism in general, and alcoholic degenerationism in particular, in British and European psychiatry in the period, and then describes the work of several individuals who challenged this notion.