dipsomania

Dipsomania, from the Greek words for "thirst" and "madness," gained popular usage in the mid-nineteenth century to describe those who drank with a seeming inability to stop.

It's Divine Dipsomania, and it's something that other amateurs can enjoy while taking their astronomical quest in new directions, developing friends and colleagues along the way.

Indeed, behind each of Charlie's lovers lurks the specter of a healthy and happy Lord Sebastian who, by the novel's end, has descended into dipsomania and depression because of the shame associated with his homosexuality.

Moreover, in an age that has Internet poker, an American vice-President who settles his differences with a ranking Congressman by telling him to '[expletive] yourself', and a magazine devoted to dipsomania (Modern Drunkard), gambling, swearing, and drinking are now usually categorized as vices (if that).

Through the meticulous analysis of such words as dipsomania, inebriety, and alcoholism, Tracy discusses social and legal changes that moved drunkards out of jails and mental institutions and into private and state-supported facilities devoted to the curing of inebriates.

Volitional monomanias included "drink monomania," or "dipsomania," which became a fashionable diagnosis in British medical circles by the middle of the nineteenth century.