On the Trail of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome

  1700s  From a 26 page study, "The Effects of Drinking on Offspring:  An Historical Survey of American and British Literature."  by Rebecca Warner and Henry l. Rosett. (1975)  The Journal of Studies on Alcohol.  lists 4 articles written in this time period that refer to the dangers of drinking while pregnant.  The complete articles are not presently included in this study but I have included the citations in the year they were written.

    1714.  First official recognition of the insane during the reign of Queen Anne (England).  From  Victorian Lunatics:  A Social Epidemiology of Mental Illness in Mid-Nineteenth Century England. by Marlene A. Arieno (1989).

    1720 to 1751:  Gin epidemic in England.  First incidence of vast production of alcohol because of distilling.
  
    1725. "British Physicians on the Dangers of Alcohol:  Petition to the House of Commons." in Drugs in America:  A Documentary History by David F. Musto. (2002) 26-35.  In 1725, London physicians petitioned the British House of Commons to solve the unbridled consumption of distilled spirits using as one of their arguments that distilled alcohol affected the parents who were "...too often the cause of weak feeble  and distempered children, who must be, instead, of an advantage and strength, a charge to their country." 
 
    Sedgewick, J.  (1725)  A New Treatise on Liquors, wherein the Use and Abuse of Wine, Malt-Drinks, Water etc. are Particularly Consider'd in Many Diseases, Constitutions and Ages; with the Proper Manner of Using Them, hot, Cold, either as Physick, Diet or Both.  London:  Charles Rivington.

    Establishment of Hook Norton, one of the earliest private sanatoriums in England.  From Victorian Lunatics:  A Social Epidemiology of Mental Illness in Mid-Nineteenth Century England. by Marlene A. Arieno (1989) 24.  Dr. Arieno notes that most people in English asylums came from the merchant and labor classes.  She writes that there was a sharp and steady rise in the proportion of the insane in the nineteenth century.  In 1807, the insane made up .00023 percent of the population but by 1890, they made up almost .003 percent of the population.  Among the indigent population, from 1844 to 1860, the increase was 96 percent.  Dr. Arieno did not consider if there was any correlation due to the increase in the consumption of alcohol.

         1730.  From Drugs in America:  A Documentary History edited by David F. Musto (2002), excerpts from anessay by Stephen Hales, an Anglican priest and an early researcher on the effects of alcohol.  Please note that Hale was referring to distilled spirits.  Like many of his time, he believed that brewed alcohol contained no such dangers; many people today still believe this.
    "Nay, the unhappy influence of these liquors reaches much farther than to the destruction of those who indulge in the use of them, even to their posterity, to the children that are yet unborn.  Of this we have we have too frequent instances, where the unhappy mothers habituate themselves to these distilled liquors, whose children, when first born, are often either of a diminutive, pigmy size, or look withered and old, as if they had numbered many years, when they have not, as yet, alas! attained to the evening of the first day.  How many more instances are there of children, who tho' born with goodconstitutions have unhappily sucked in the deadly spirituous poison with their nurses' milk."
    Hales goes on to express his opinion.  "Whence it is evident that in proportion as the contagion spreads father and farther among mankind, so must the breed of human species be  proportionately more and more depraved, and will accordingly degenerate more and more from the manly and robust constitution of preceding generations."

    1751.  Fielding, H. An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase in Robbers, etc. with Some Proposals for Remedying this Growing Evil.  London:  A.Millar.

William Hogarth prints a lithograph called "Gine Lane".  Modern researchers say the baby in the picture has features resembling a child with full Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.

    1759.  Morris, C.  A Collection of the Yearly Bills of Mortality from 1657 to 1758 Inclusive.  To which are Subjoined...III.  Observations on the past growth and present State of the City of London; reprinted from the edition printed at London.  London:  A. Millar.
 
    1781.  Foster, E. The Principles and Practices of Midwifery.  London:  R. Baldwin.

    1785.  Dr. Benjamin Rush (one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and described as the first psychiatrist in America) in Inquiry into the Effects of Ardent Spirit Upon the Human Body, writing about alcoholics and their effect on their children.  He writes in part "...their children, filthy, and half clad, without manners, principles and morals!"  From Drugs in America:  A Documentary History edited by David. F. Musto.  (2002)  New York:  New York University Press.

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