ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the construction of the hypothesis of addiction as it was approached by three prominent and influential theorists in the second half of the nineteenth century, the pathologist F. E. Anstie, the physician George Beard, and the philosopher Herbert Spencer. These men were major proponents of the formal, paradigmatic knowledge about the concept of addiction as it gained scientific acceptance. The pathologist's taxonomy of drugs and drug reactions, the physicians construction of a disease, and the philosophers theories of psychology all embraced and elucidated the concept of addiction. It was not until the 1860s that discussion of addiction began to make a concerted move towards a systematic application of an emotionally colder, more candid empiricism. The abnormal nutrition of the immoderate opium-eater resulted in physical degeneration which might or might not tend to shorten life, but, where death was premature it was and neither to a special disease of the nervous system nor to a disease of addiction.
