The study of alcohol in Britain also includes volumes that consider the health consequences of drinking and the ways in which they shape public attitudes toward drinking. Virginia Berridge’s study Demons offers an important encapsulation and analysis of changing attitudes toward alcohol, tobacco, and drugs, and in relation to public health debates. In a similar vein but more specifically focused, Alcohol and Liver Cirrhosis in Twentieth-Century Britain, by Ryosuke Yokoe, details how emerging understandings of cirrhosis in the medical profession influenced public perceptions of and even public policy regarding alcohol consumption. Although not focused on alcohol, Berridge’s book Marketing Health charts public health discourse around smoking in the latter half of the twentieth century. Similarly, Louise Foxcroft’s The Making of Addiction considers how the use and misuse of opium in nineteenth-century Britain contributed to understandings of addiction as a disease.
