Alcoholism: Amnesia experimentally reproduced.
Case 89. (Kastan, January, 1916.)
February 15, 1915, a German soldier drank beer in the canteen and at roll-call appeared tipsy. He then went to bed, but rose an hour later to go to town. A quarter of an hour later, he went to a clerk’s house and asked for paper, on the ground that the next day he was going to march to Warsaw. The clerk gave him no paper, which he then tried to get by force. A policeman arrested him and he said, “You just wait, lame dog!” Upon examination he denied that he had ever been guilty of any crime but had been in institutions on account of delirium. In point of fact, this man had grown up in very bad surroundings, amongst quarrels and disputes of his parents, who kept a disorderly house. At 19 he had been convicted of incest. He finally admitted having been convicted for rape. It was found that he had once run out into the front trenches; had been removed by an advance guard to a stable, and then wondered why he was not in school. He described a number of attacks of delirium although he had not drunk more than moderately.
He was given an experimental dose of 50 c.c. of alcohol, and in ten minutes became excited, tried to get out of bed, attacked other patients without reason, and was able to speak neither spontaneously nor in response to questions. In a period of two hours he became clear and asked what the trouble was. He knew only that he had taken alcohol.
Re the experimental excitement produced in Kastan’s case by the exhibition of alcohol, it is of note that Bérard has been much impressed by the agitation that surgical cases of alcoholism undergo when anesthetized. It may be that the anesthetics act similarly to the experimental alcoholism of Kastan’s case. According to Bérard, these phenomena of the anesthetized wounded (who are men recently evacuated from the front and other hospital cases) are of larval alcoholism brought out by the anesthesia. Bérard wonders whether rum issues at the front are at all responsible therefor.