Moderate drinking before the unit: Medicine and life assurance in Britain and the US c.1860–1930

Abstract

This paper describes the way in which 'Anstie's Limit' -a particular definition of moderate drinking first defined in Britain in the 1860s by the physician Francis Edmund Anstie (1833-1874) -became established as a useful measure of moderate alcohol consumption. Becoming fairly well-established in mainstream Anglophone medicine by 1900, it was also communicated to the public in Britain, North America and New Zealand through newspaper reports. However the Limit also travelled to less familiar places, including life assurance offices, where a number of different strategies for separating moderate from excessive drinkers emerged from the dialogue between medicine and life assurance. While these ideas of moderation seem to have disappeared into the background for much of the twentieth century, re-emerging as the 'J-shaped' curve, these early developments anticipate many of the questions surrounding uses of the 'unit' to quantify moderate alcohol consumption in Britain today. The paper will therefore conclude by exploring some of the lessons of this story for contemporary discussions of moderation, suggesting that we should pay more attention to whether these metrics work, where they work, and why.

Beyond moralising, disciplining and normalising discourses: Re-thinking geographies of alcohol, drinking, drunkenness

“…In response, numerous publications have explored spatialities and temporalities of bodies, emotions and affect relating to social mixing, conviviality, sociability, exclusion, and inclusion. (Jayne et al, 2010;Leyshon, 2005;Ural, 2017;Waitt and Clement, 2016;Waitt and De Jong, 2014;Waitt et al, 2011;Wilkinson, 2015); discussed 'units' as a bio-social-financial measure that determines the cost of health insurance and as a dominant measure in alcohol policy and practice (Jayne et al, 2011b;Kneale and French, 2015); and considered 'drunken' (im)obilities (Jayne et al, 2012;Wilkinson, 2018). Other studies have focused on assemblages (Bøhling, 2015;Shaw, 2014;Wilkinson, 2018); flows, friction, and socio-material metabolisation of alcohol (Lawhon, 2013) and offered new theoretical perspective on 'alcoholrelated' violence and disorder (Jayne and Valentine, 2016a).…”

Public Health and Alcohol Licensing in the UK

“…As both overall consumption and temperance activism peaked in the late 19th century, health effects again became a key part of public debates. Temperance groups such as the Band of Hope produced regular calculations of the costs of alcohol-related health harms to the nation, the medical temperance movement was prominent in calling for restrictions on availability, and doctors such as Francis Anstie developed widely adopted versions of recommended drinking guidelines (Berridge, 2005; Kneale, 2014; McAllister, 2014). However, the most extensive investigation into licensing of the late-Victorian period—the 1899 Royal Commission on Licensing, otherwise known as the “Peel Commission”—made scant reference to public health impacts in its prolonged analysis of the effect of availability and density on alcohol harms, focusing instead on drunkenness, disorder, and moral decline (House of Commons, 1899).…”