Historical Perspective of Alcoholism

Introduction inebriant is the oldest and still probably the more or less widely utilize dose today. Some consider inebriant as an opp starnt however legion(predicate) consider it as an all(prenominal)y. Moderate amounts stimulate the mind and decelerate the muscles, but larger amounts impair coordination and judgment, finally producing coma and death. It is an addictive drug leading to intoxicantism. Alcohol is cognise since antiquity to flummox some curative value. Opium and intoxicant had long been use as analgesics. Hellenic practice of medicine had assiduous wine and vinegar in wound care. Now we know that alcohol is a good antiseptic.Alcohol has other values in recent medicine such as pain relief, delay labor, raising alpha-lipoprotein level, etc. Pure ethanol is a colorless, combustible liquid (boiling maneuver 78. 5? C). Ethanol, produced by fermentation as in wine or beer or by synthesis, is a dilute solution and must be concentrated by distillation for making other drenching beverages or pure ethanol for injections. This article will review the origins of alcohol and its umteen uses throughout history. Early Alcoholism Since antiquity, alcohol-containing beverages played a vital scatter in the cursory lives of ancient people.Beer, from fermented barley, is the earliest known alcoholic present to man. Beer was an integral part of their religious ceremonies and mythology. Early civilizedizations be the mood-altering properties of beer supernatural, and the newfound allege of intoxication was considered divine. Beer, it was deoxyguanosine monophosphateght, must contain a spirit or god, since imbibition the liquid so possessed the spirit of the foxer. Remnants of this belief persist to mod measures. We still refer to alcohol and alcoholic beverages as spirits. The spill the beans of a perfectly happy man is filled with beer, is an ancient Egyptian proverb. Indeed, numerous ancient Egyptian inscriptions and documents sh ow that beer, together with bread, was a daily food. Beer was an important offering to the gods, and was placed in tombs for the subsequentlylife. An inscription in the tomb of Ramses II (c. 1200 B. C. ) reads And thou shall give me to eat until I am satisfied, and thou shalt give to me beer until I am drunk. The ancient Greeks called beer zythos, which was derived from the Egyptian word zythum.The Romans brewed and drank cerevisia, named after Ceres, the goddess of agriculture. The Romans had a god Dionysus, or Bacchus, the god of wine, who they worshipped in bouts of alcoholic frenzy. The hangover plagued mankind. It was a top medical priority in the days of ancient Egypt. Cabbage succus was the Pharaohs remedy. For many hundreds of years we ready looked upon this old wives tale with amusement. However, recent scientific studies have shown that cabbage juice can chelate some of alcohols byproducts after the colorful has detoxified it.Ancient cultures brewed beer for religiou s ceremonies as well as for their own enjoyment. beverage beer was the principal means by which worshippers achieved religious ecstasy. Beer occupied a major role in ancient literary repertoire. For example, the Finnish poetic saga, Kalewala, has four hundred verses devoted to beer but only 200 were needed for the creation of the earth. agree to the Edda, the gigantic Nordic epic, wine was reserved for the gods, beer belonged to mortals, and mead an alcoholic drink of fermented making love and water to inhabitants of the realm of the dead.Although beer and brewing was known in many ancient cultures, the oldest proved records of brewing are about 5,500 years old and can be traced to Mesopotamia ancient Iraq. A vast repository of cuneiform writings from the area depicts beer and brewing, and then the Mesopotamians are credited with the first beer. The earliest account of barley is found on an ancient Sumerian engraving describing beer making. Beer made people note exhilarated, wonderful and blissful. The Royal Cemetery of Ur, one of the most spectacular discoveries in ancient Mesopotamia, contains mid-3rd millennium BC tombs of kings and queens of the city of Ur.One of the tombs belonged to fay Pu-abi who was buried with her servants. Among the hundreds of gold and silver items found to accompany her to the afterlife was a five-liter silver jar, her daily allotment of barley beer. Hammurabi, who decreed the oldest known assembly of laws, established a daily beer ration. This ration was dependent on the sociable standing of the individual. For example, a normal worker received 2 liters, civil servants 3 liters, and administrators and high priests 5 liters per day.In those ancient propagation beer was not sold, but exchanged for barley. As beer brewing was a household art, it was in like manner womens work. Hammurabi once ordered a female saloon-keeper drowned for serving pitiable quality beer. The importance of beer to other(a) man is highlighted i n Gilgamesh, the great Mesopotamian heroic and written in the 3rd millenium B. C. It is the oldest literary epic in the world. Enkidu, the brute primitive man, drank seven cups of beer and his spirit loosened and his heart soared. In this school he washed himself and became a human cosmos. Thus, Enkidu, the wild-man, evolved from primitive man to courtly man after tasting beer. History of Alcoholism in Arab The oldest alcoholic drinks were fermented beverages of relatively low alcohol content, that is, the beers and wines. When the Arabs introduced the then recent science of distilling into atomic number 63 in the Middle jump ons, the alchemists believed that alcohol was the long-sought elixir of life. Alcohol was therefore held to be a remedy for practically all diseases, as indicated by the end point whisky (Gaelic water of life).The concept of an elixir or life-giving potion originated from the writings of Jabir ibn Hayyan (8th blow AD) and al-Rahzi (9th century AD) and known to the West as Geber and Rhazes respectively. They were the most important scientists in the history of chemistry and chemical substance technology in Islam. Their works exerted a dominating influence on later generations of Muslims and Europeans. The most important of the great chemical discoveries in the Middle Ages were alcohol and mineral acids, and the key to finding them was through the accomplish of distillation, which the Arabs developed and mastered.Distillation was one of the most important processes in Islamic chemical technology and was sedulous for both medicinal preparations and a variety of other technological and industrial uses, including the preparation of acids and the distillation of perfumes, rosewater and essential oils. Several great Muslim chemists all the way described the distillation of wine using specialized distillation equipment. Al-Rahzi, in his book Kitab al-Asrar (The Book of Secrets) described the process of distillation and the weapon use d. He used distillation to concentrate alcohol, which was then taken as an anesthetic.Al-Kindi (9th century AD), describes distillation and the apparatus in his book, Kitab Kimya al-itr wa al-Tas-idat (Book of Perfume Chemistry and Distillation). Al-Kindi says In the equivalent way, one can distill wine using a water-bath, and it comes out the same color as rosewater. In Spain, the Arab surgeon Aub al-Qasim al-Zahrawi, (d. 1013 AD), known to the West as Albucasis, described the distillation of vinegar in an apparatus similar to that used for rosewater, adding that wine could be distilled in the same way. He described using alcohol as a solvent for drugs.The flammable keeping of alcohol was noted by Jabir (Geber) And fire which burns on the mouths of bottles due to . . . boiled wine and salt, and similar things with nice characteristics which are thought to be of little use, these are of great significance in these sciences. The flammable property of alcohol was utilized for vari ous applications in Arabic military and chemical treatises of the 12th and 13th centuries. Many Arabic manuscripts describing the chemical recipe for alcohol eventually found their way into 12th and 13th century European works and attributed to various European authors.Clearly, the Arabs were the first to distill alcohol and used it for medicinal purposes. From the Arab world, knowledge of distillation spread to Europe and European alchemists began experimenting with the distillation of many items, but medicines were still mostly given as infusions or decoctions of single herbs. Arabic writings in Spain began to influence Christian schools of medicine in Italy and France. The 13th century Spanish alchemists, Arnold Villanueva and Raymond Lully, introduced wine spirits, which they called aqua vitae (water of life) as a solvent into European medicine.This later became known as brandy, pint-sized from the German term for burnt wine. Brandy was used as medicine by itself for various d iseases and later became popular as a recreational drink as well. In the 16th century, the Swiss physician Paracelsus popularized the use of distilled alcohol as a solvent to prepare tinctures from herbs and chemicals. History of Alcoholism in USA During the early 1970s, partly in response to student movements of the achievement many states lowered the potable age to 18 the thought being that if a young man could be sent to war, he should be able to legally purchase and consume alcohol.It was also at this time that the voting age was lowered to 18. In short, what happened at this time is that college students demanded, and received, the same constitutional rights as adults e. g. to vote, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, rights to privacy (including access to contraception, and abortion), etc. This consensus was challenged by the College Alcohol Study started by a group of exploreers at the Harvard School of Public Health, led by social psychologist Henry Wechsler, who b egan exploring the paradox of college drinking in the late 1970s and early 1980s.Their work in part led to the passage of the National Minimum Drinking Age act of 1984. It also led to the construction of overgorge drinking as a disease and social problem particular to young adults in higher education settings. I was an undergraduate at the University of Vermont while all this was going on the state was a holdout on keeping the drinking age at 18 but was eventually forced to stimulate the drinking age to get those federal highway funds.More lately still, the abstinence approach bolstered by the College Alcohol Study has been challenged by research conducted by the Social Norms Institute, who argue that the health terrorism perpetuated by the binge drinking model has not solved the problem of campus drinking, it simply has created an resistor culture of drinking. They argue that by focusing on the most flagrant cases, prevention efforts have exaggerated the extent to which most college students drink. Their approach is unco similar to that proposed by the Yale Center in the 1940s i. . emphasize wellness, resilience, and inform decision making. Harmful make of alcohol The long-term harmful effect of alcohol abuse on the body are also great. 50 percent of chronic liver disease is caused by alcohol abuse. Alcohol is also associated with many other diseases, including pancreatitis, cardiomyopathy, peripheral neuropathy, dementia and other profound nervous system disorders, and the fetal alcohol syndrome. Alcohol abuse is associated with cancers of the nutritive and respiratory tracts and possibly with breast cancer.High amounts of alcohol or longterm intake increase insulin resistance, triglyceride levels, blood pressure and all-cause mortality. Binges may result in arrhythmias. Alcoholics have elevated levels of plasma homocysteine, which has been linked to premature vascular disease. Beneficial effects of alcohol There is no doubt that when used app ropriately, alcohol has many medicinal uses, as mentioned earlier. Beer was used as anesthetic since ancient times and was a common component in ancient prescriptions in Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greek medicine.Since many recorded ancient prescriptions contain many ingredients, it is often vexed to determine which is the active component. Many powerful drugs must have been administered unintentionally, for the cognition behind many folk remedies rests on the accumulated weight of empiric experience through the millennia. One of the fascinating finds of medical archaeology is the maculation of the antibiotic drug tetracycline on a thin section of organise from Roman Egypt.It is thought that tetracycline was formed in the brewing process as a result of contamination with an airborne streptomycete, and then ingested with the beer. Beer, therefore, skill have been an unintentional vehicle for the delivery of powerful antibiotics in those early times. Since beer was a fundamenta l food staple, a constant intake of this antibiotic might have influenced the pattern of bacterial infection. It is possible that the well-known great bacterial resistance to tetracycline today maybe due to bacterial exposure to it since antiquity.