Bacchic Medicine: Wine and Alcohol Therapies from Napoleon to the French Paradox (review)

This has the makings of a very interesting study. Harry Paul has undoubtedly gathered a wealth of promising material: his sources range from folkloric accounts of "traditional" drinking practices to the minutes of scholarly meetings and the learned treatises of obscure physicians. He reminds us of debates now easily forgotten, such as that which raged over the "plastering" of wine (actually, the sprinkling of plaster of paris on the crushed grapes), and alerts us to groups of social actors (such as "Doctors in the Bordeaux area," p. 202) of whose existence we might otherwise have remained ignorant. The book does indeed cover the entire period from the early nineteenth century to the present day and touches on a host of important issues—the growth of temperance moralities, the commercialization of French wine production, and the professionalization of medicine among them.

Nonetheless, I found this a frustrating book, for the author's analysis of this potentially rich material strikes me as little more than an arrangement in loosely chronological order. An introductory chapter summarizes attitudes toward wine in "popular medicine" and refers to various "traditional" beliefs from before the French Revolution. The following chapters describe particular episodes, texts, or debates. In one chapter Paul reports the findings of an early nineteenth-century Weimar physician whom he describes as "probably" having written the "first complete professional medical manual" on wine's therapeutic uses (p. 28). In another, he narrates nineteenth-century British physicians' criticisms of alcohol and concludes that it would be "unenlightening" to ask whether their increasingly severe condemnation stemmed from "internal changes in medicine itself" or from "the result of external events" (p. 93). Yet this verdict does not, as far as I can tell, bespeak a polemical desire (à la Bruno Latour) to break down the idea of science having an "inside" and an "outside." Instead, it arises from what I see as the book's fundamental conceptual weakness: a profound reluctance to address questions of causality, to analyze how historical change happens. History, it appears, just happens, and the historian's job is complete when he has filled several hundred pages with surprising anecdotes and bibliographic notes.

As should be clear, my main quarrel with this book is with its method. Best described, I think, as a sort of "anthologizing iteration," the historian's practice here consists of summarizing various curious arguments and commenting on them in a casual and chatty fashion. For instance, after reporting that a Greek medical commission of the 1930s recommended that "watering holes frequented by peasants and workers should be allowed to sell only beer and wine [as opposed to hard liquors]," Paul writes: "This was good advice, generally ignored. . . . In France, only the authoritarian regime of Vichy dared attempt . . . to prevent Frenchmen from poisoning themselves by an excessive consumption of alcohol. But Pétain's collaboration with the anti-alcoholic axis of Hitler and Mussolini was only a brief period" (p. 264).

Because it makes little argument, the book is necessarily inconclusive. "Perhaps" the "traditional practice" of parishioners who "guzzled" wine that had been blessed on February 3 (feast of the patron saint of sore throats) faded because such forms of "collective action" threatened the "post-Revolutionary clergy"—or, "perhaps," the same clergy, newly "Vatican-oriented no longer retained faith in the old medicine" (p. 3). "Perhaps as a result of centuries of exposure to the Catholic dogma of transubstantiation, the French readily accepted" symbols relating the body to food (p. 14). And so it goes, for another three hundred pages. The largely descriptive style produces platitudes (e.g., "Medicine has always been laden with theories," p. 25) but too few insights. This book's subject remains one whose historical significance has not...