science · 15 August 1890 · 134 years ago
birth
Born 15 Aug 1890; died 22 Oct 1963 at age 73.
Elvin Morton Jellinek was an American physiologist who was a pioneer in the scientific study of the nature and causes of alcoholism and in descriptions of its symptomatology. He was an early proponent of the disease theory of alcoholism, arguing with great persuasiveness that alcoholics should be treated as sick people. Jellinek gathered and summarized his own research and that of others in the important and authoritative works Alcohol Explored (1942) and The Disease Concept of Alcoholism (1960). In the latter book, Jellinek also recognized that some features of the disease (e.g., inability to abstain and loss of control) were shaped by cultural factors.
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