In Catholic Belgium, excessive drinking and habitual drunkenness were condemned as a vice. Once one yielded to the temptation, faith and willpower were the solutions religion offered to combat the immoral urge to drink. As in the rest of Europe, in nineteenth-century Belgium the problem of drunkenness became ever more an area of expertise of science and medicine. This medicalization of morality in general and drunkenness in particular has been interpreted as a social and cultural shift in the second half of the century: excessive drinking was removed from the realm of religious morality where it had lingered for centuries and instead was claimed by the positivistic world of scientific medicine. Historians have seen this as part of a wider process of the professionalization of doctors, who forged themselves through expansion of their expertise as a hegemonic group in society. By calling the increasingly powerful body of medical professionals, ‘the new confessors’, Karel Velle, following Michel Foucault, has argued that doctors in Belgium generally assumed social roles performed in earlier times by the clergy. Sociologists have further argued that the construction of drunkenness as a disease coincided with the consolidating of medical professional identities.

This chapter will illustrate how this process was both scattered and uneven. Different emerging specialties claimed expertise on the subject of alcoholism. In the mid-nineteenth century those who were interested in the problem of drunkenness were mostly men involved in matters of public health, so-called ‘hygienists’.