Medicine: Free Will & Drink

What makes a man an alcoholic? Alcoholism, answer psychiatrists, is a symptom of mental disease, and thus chronic drinking in many cases may be as unavoidable and blameless as catching a cold. But last week a Pennsylvania court, in a case involving alcoholism, contradicted the psychiatrists’ view, argued that a man can avoid becoming an alcoholic if he wants to.

Allen G. Lynch, 43, a Pittsburgh lawyer, drank himself out of his practice. After several hospital attempts at a cure failed, he wound up in helpless seclusion oh a friend’s farm. His estranged wife sued the Mutual Life Insurance Co. for benefits under his disability policies. Said Judge Claude T. Reno, of the state superior court, in rejecting the claim:

“Man drinks because he desires, intends, wills to experience the effects of drink. . . . Conceding that men do not deliberately intend to become chronic alcoholics, what shall be said of a man who, knowing the ultimate results, seeks the accumulative effects which liquor produces? If a sane man chooses to loose destructive forces upon himself, the law will not relieve him from his folly.”

Sighed Dr. Robert Felix, chief of the U.S. Public Health Service’s mental hygiene division: “A most sad and unfortunate decision. If this philosophy were adopted in cases of chronic alcoholism, it would set psychiatry as well as medicine back a generation.”