Confessions of a Recovering Realist Book

Until the late 19th century, 'alcoholism' meant physiological damage - cirrhosis and so on - rather than some kind of predilection. This book describes how political and legal movements were linked with the ebb and flow of its medicalization. Its run as a bona fide disease, sometimes under other names such as dipsomania, lasted until the 1970s, when it was removed from the International Classification of Diseases, and it's currently sometimes thought of as an addiction or dependency, sometimes as an individual's moral choice.