The idea that habitually drinking to excess is a disease originated with a Dr. Benjamin Rush in the early 1800s.71 Rush considered intemperance, as well as lying, murder and political dissent, to all be diseases.72 and being a black person a disease symptom.73 He believed that in habitual drunkards “desire overpowered the will” meaning, in twentieth century terms, that they “lost control.” His cure was temperance, meaning no hard liquor and only beer and wine in moderation.

Rush's ideas were picked up by the growing Temperance Movement. By the 1840s, hundreds of thousands of members of the Washingtonians, a society of reformed drunkards pledged to abstinence, were preaching about their personal experience of loss of control and religious cure.

Of great significance is that, apparently, through the centuries of colonial America, no one ever reported loss of control until one person did so in 1795. Prior to that date, when people drank too much, it was because they wanted to.

The Washingtonians soon disappeared but Rush's ideas, enmeshed in strong currents of Protestant Revivalism, were carried through the late 1800s and into the early part of this century. With the collapse of the Washingtonians, secret societies of abstainers were formed such as the “Most Worthy Scribe of the Sons of Temperance” and the “Independent Order of Good Templars.” The Good Templars alone claimed 300,000 members. These groups virtually disappeared in the early 1900s with the development of the movement toward Probhibition. However, the idea that alcoholism is a disease didn't.