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A disciplinary case: Alcoholism.

Case 93. (Kastan, January, 1916.)

A German soldier, brought up for examination for disobedience and insubordination with intoxication, was found already to have been convicted 33 times of a variety of crimes. Once he had drunk a bottle of shoemaker’s polish, evidently with suicidal intent.

In the canteen he had assaulted superior officers and tried to strike a sergeant. He said he had been attacked by the sergeant and pushed into a cell, whereupon he had lost his mind.

He came from a family of drunkards, and had been himself very alcoholic formerly. On the day in question, however, he had drunk very little. According to his account, he had fits of this sort if any one injured him. He was amnestic and had forgotten his previous convictions. Anything he might have done, he said, had happened a long time ago, in his youth. For example, concerning a theft, he said that it was merely that he had fallen into some Christmas trees and stuck fast there, and no one wanted to be paid. Tremors of hands, feet, head. Analgesia of thorax.

Re alcoholism and disciplinary cases, we find alcoholism bulking large in Lépine’s account of military delinquency. Fugue subjects are not infrequently alcoholic. Minor disobedience is also often alcoholic. Acts of violence are characteristically alcoholic, or executed by subjects with hereditary alcoholic taint. (Such acts were in France especially common before the anti-absinthe law in 1915.) Alcoholic episodes and impulses often culminate in arson. No doubt, espionage employs alcoholism for a portion of its technique, though delusional mystics and subnormal hypersuggestibles are more often the purveyors of information to the enemy. The theft list, also, shows its share of alcoholics. Alcoholics are less common amongst those who, contrary to rules, assume shoulder-straps or other decorations. Here the sub-normals and victims of imbalance, as well as the drug cases, are more likely to figure if the matter is psychiatric at all.