# How did investigations into spontaneous human combustion influence alcohol medicine? An examination of the medical and literary discussions that brought the two together

## TL;DR

This paper explores how the idea of spontaneous human combustion influenced early theories about alcohol's effects on the body and mind in the 19th century.

## Contribution

It reveals how a discredited concept shaped medical and literary discussions on alcohol consumption.

## Key findings

- Spontaneous human combustion was used as an extreme example to support early clinical chemistry theories on alcohol.
- Over half of key 19th-century English texts on alcohol included sections on spontaneous human combustion.
- The link between spirit drinking and human combustion influenced public and medical discourse on alcohol.

## Abstract

The presence of sections or chapters on spontaneous human combustion in more than half of the key texts in English on the action of alcohol on the body and mind in the first half of the nineteenth century demonstrates the seriousness with which it was considered. We aimed to chart discussions about the links between spontaneous human combustion and spirit drinking in medical texts and representations in fiction through three key chronological periods from 1804 to 1900.

A contextual analysis using eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century historical, literary and medical sources to chart and reflect on public and medical discourses.

The development of new theories about the action of alcohol on the body and mind appears to have been influenced by the now‐discredited eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century idea that the phenomenon of human combustion, spontaneous or not, was linked to spirit drinking. As an extreme example of the consequences of heavy drinking, spontaneous human combustion was used to underpin early theories on the clinical chemistry of alcohol.