Industrial Maladjustment: Literary Naturalism and the Eugenic Spirit of Medicalization

This paper examines medical and literary representations of alcohol addiction in the period between 1870 and 1930, when rising transatlantic interest in hereditarianism marked a turning point in scientific debates over the nature of drug dependency. I read Stephen Crane’s short novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), alongside contemporary hospital records on “industrial maladjustment,” which ascribed to racialized laboring classes the heritable failure to adapt to modern rhythms of production.[1] I argue medicalizing addiction relied on the ecological, not just biological management of the poor, immigrants, and racial minorities. Alcoholism retained residual associations with self-control at the same time it gained new associations with race, place, and heredity. Inebriety became a transferrable symptom of race degeneration, a “poison that lurks in the blood,” as a Brooklyn hospital superintendent noted in 1894.[2] Unlike most scholarship on early medicalization, my research highlights the ecological role of eugenics in correlating physicalistic constructions of the raced body with moralistic control over that body’s surroundings. White physicians frequently emphasized unfit genes linked to lingering degeneracy, as their counterparts in public health sought alternative environmental conditions for educating away debauched habits viewed to be caused by those genes. Through archival and close literary analysis, I show Crane compliments but also complicates medicalization’s racial ecology by lending causal relations to unevenly distributed harms of capitalist industry on the web of life.