Louisa May Alcott

EARLY LIFE

Louisa May Alcott was born on November 29, 1832 in Germantown, which is now part of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was the second of four daughters of transcendentalist and educator Amos Bronson Alcott and social worker Abby May.

Louisa grew up in the company of her father's friends, the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson and the naturalist Henry David Thoreau. Emerson said prophetically of young Louisa's early attempts to write. "She is a natural source of stories... she is and is to be the poet of children."

When Louisa was 12 she and her family moved into the Concord, Massachusetts, home they named "Hillside" on April 1, 1845. They sold it seven years later to Nathaniel Hawthorne, who renamed it The Wayside.

She enjoyed visiting Emerson's library, excursions into nature with Henry David Thoreau and theatricals in the barn at Hillside (which Louisa had written).

A tomboy, Louisa liked climbing trees and leaping fences.

Headshot of Louisa May Alcott at age 20

WRITING CAREER

Alcott could write with both her left and right hand.

Her first published work was a poem Sunlight, which was published in Peterson's Magazine in 1852.

She originally turned to writing to support her impoverished family and earned $2,000 with her 1863 compilation Hospital Sketches. The work was based on letters Alcott sent home during the six weeks she spent as a volunteer army nurse during the American Civil War in Georgetown.

Her most famous book was Little Women. This largely autobiographical novel was penned in six weeks at home during the summer of 1868. The story about four teenage sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March growing up in a Victorian New England village was based on Louisa and her sisters coming of age.

Alcott wrote Little Women for girls but was skeptical it would find an audience because she "never liked girls nor knew many, except my sisters; but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting though I doubt it."

Jo March, who was a partial self portrait, was the first American juvenile heroine to be shown acting from her own individuality.

An immediate success, Little Women instantly sold more than 2,000 copies and soon made Alcott famous. It has since been translated into 20 languages.

Alcott wrote three sequels to Little Women - Little Women Part 2 (1869), Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886).

Alcott penned over 300 books in different genres. These included several racy pot boilers under a pseudonym A. M. Barnard, such as A Long Fatal Love Chase and Pauline's Passion and Punishment. These adult novels were of the type referred to in Little Women as "dangerous for little minds."

By the time of Alcott's death her book sales had reached the one million mark. And she'd realized $200,000 from her fiction.

Louisa May Alcott

NURSING 

Alcott served as a nurse during the American Civil War in a union hospital at Georgetown, now part of Washington DC. The letters that she wrote to her family were later published as Hospital Sketches. This was her first book which got critical recognition.

Alcott contacted typhoid pneumonia from the unsanitary conditions in the union hospital. The doctors used calomel, a drug laden with mercury, to cure her. A side effect of Alcott's treatment was losing her hair and numerous mouth sores. She never fully recovered her health and after returning home to Concord, Alcott suffered mental depressions and hallucinations in which a Spaniard clad in black leaped through her bedroom window at night.

BELIEFS

Alcott was a free-thinker and addressed a number of women's issues, including protesting against the corset.

Later in life, Alcott became active in the women's suffrage movement and was the first female register to vote in at home town of Concord in 1879.

RELATIONSHIPS

Alcott never married, but in 1865, while travelling in Europe, she met a Polish musician named Ladislas Wisniewski, whom she nicknamed Laddie. The flirtation between Laddie and Louisa culminated in them spending two weeks together in Paris.

When her youngest sister May died in 1879, Alcott took her two year old daughter, Louisa May Nieriker ("Lulu"), into care.

DEATH

Louisa May Alcott died March 6, 1888, at the age of 55, on the day of her father's funeral. She succumbed to the lingering after-effects of mercury poisoning, contracted during her Civil War service.

She was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery at Bedford Street in Concord, Massachusetts. Henry Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau can be found at the same cemetery.

Alcopops

In Britain, Babycham, a fizzy alcoholic drink made from pears and aimed at women was launched in 1953. This innovative new type of drink was invented by Francis Showering, a Somerset brewer.

A new blend of alcohol and pop, known as Alcopops, was launched in Australia and the UK in 1996 . The first two drinks to be sold were Two Dogs and Hoopers Hooch, both alcoholic lemonade drinks made in Australia. They achieved sales in Britain of over 100 million in less than a year after their launch.

A Japanese Two Dogs can By James Nash 

Consumer groups condemned the sweet-tasting alcoholic drinks for encouraging underage drinking.

The value of alcopops sales rocketed by 70 per cent between 2000 and 2002 but then began to decline. One of the reasons for this was a rise in taxes on the drinks which led to an increase in shelf prices.

Many brands of alcopops bear names that smack of raffishness, such as Wildbrew, Lemonhead or Barking Frog, although other brands aim for something cooler such as Smirnoff Ice and Bacardi Breezer.

Two Bacardi Breezers

The drinks companies refer to these products generically as FABs (flavored alcoholic beverages). Or RTDs (ready-to-drinks).

Source Brewer's Dictionary of Modern Phrase and Fable.

Alcoholic Problems In The Western World Today

In the US  it is estimated there are currently 5,400,000 alcoholics and that 100,000 people a year die from alcohol linked problems. However the increased likelihood of an alcoholic or habitual binge drinker dying through a liver or brain disease is not the only consequence of an over indulgence of wine, beer or spirits. It is estimated that nearly 40% of Americans witness in their family the effects of alcohol abuse, including domestic violence. In particular many thousands of babies suffer physical difficulties such as deafness and heart problems or brain damage because their mothers refused to cut back on their heavy drinking during pregnancy. Also over 17,000 American people die and over 500,000 are injured per annum in drunk driving motor accidents. 

Meanwhile in the UK recent Health department figures showed that in 2004 a fifth of men and one in 11 women were occasional or habitual binge drinkers. Binge drinking costs Britain £20 billion a year, including according to 2004 figures £7.3 billion through drink-related crime, £6.4 billion from 17 million working days per annum lost to hangovers or liver disorders and £1.7 billion spent by the National Health Service on the results of alcohol misuse. Drink is related to half of all violent crimes. One survey suggested that over 80% of sex-attack victims were drunk. 

The problem often starts at an early age. College students have a reputation for engaging in binge drinking. In a survey in the US it was discovered that in the course of a few weeks nearly 65 percent of college students had experienced a hangover from excessive drinking, and over 55.percent reported having been nauseated or vomiting due to alcohol over indulgence.

Alcoholism

EC Booz, a mid 19th century whiskey distiller from Philadelphia liked to use the old English word “bousen”, which means, “to drink deeply." People picked up on this and as his surname is similar to “bousen”, the word “booz” was adopted as a slang term.

Drunkenness officially achieved disease status in 1849 when the term "alcoholism" appeared for the first time in an essay Alcoholismus Chronicus by the Swedish physician Magnus Huss.

Adriaen Brouwer, Inn with Drunken Peasants, 1620s

Some towns in Iowa sold their jails on the eve of Prohibition, as they were so certain crime was caused by alcohol.

Two American alcoholics, Bill Wilson and Dr Bob Smith met for the first time in 1935. They struck up a solid friendship linked to their shared struggles with overcoming their drinking problems.

Wilson and Smith began working with other alcoholics. Soon, other heavy drinkers were meeting together in groups with the goal of of staying sober and helping other alcoholics to achieve sobriety.

In 1938, after about 100 alcoholics in Akron and New York had become sober, the fellowship decided to promote its program of recovery through the publication of a book, for which Wilson was chosen as primary author.

The book was titled Alcoholics Anonymous and the movement itself took on the name of the publication.

Alcoholics Anonymous is today an international mutual aid fellowship with about two million members worldwide belonging to approximately 10,000 groups.

     Figure of the Alcoholics Anonymous Wikipedia Commons

Katherine Hepburn only drank water throughout The African Queen production as a protest against John Huston and Humphrey Bogart's alcoholism. However, most of the cast and crew became sick from the water and only Bogart and Huston were unaffected because they just drank whiskey.

The Irish poet Brendan Behan became an alcoholic at the age of eight. 

Alcohol consumption doubled in the United Kingdom between 1965 and 2005. Current statistics reveal that almost six million people are thought to be binge drinkers, consuming more than the recommended units of alcohol in a single session.

The number of deaths from cirrhosis in young people has risen ten-fold since the 1970s.

The top 10% of drinkers account for more than half of all alcohol consumed in the United States. Which equates to them consuming an average 73.85 drinks per week.

Alcohol-associated excesses accounted for 52% of all [Russian] deaths at ages 15–54 years from 1990–2001.

Worldwide, about 5% of the world's adult population (240 million people) have an alcohol use disorder.

The Dutch city of Amsterdam employs alcoholics as street cleaners and pays them with beer. In addition to the five cans, they also get €10 ($11.36) and half a pack of loose tobacco for each 6.5 hour shift.

Source Huffington Post

Alcoholics Anonymous

Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is an international self help organization for those fighting the "battle of the bottle."

In May 1935 two American alcoholics, Bill Wilson — a stockbroker — and Dr Bob Smith — a surgeon - met for the first time at a church group. They struck up a solid friendship linked to their shared struggles with overcoming their drinking problems.

On June 10, 1935 Wilson gave Smith a beer to steady his hands before an operation he was to perform, The beer was the doctor's last and they promised to help each other remain sober and to work with others to do the same.

Inspired by stories of other alcoholics getting over their difficulties by having a spiritual awakening and their own experiences in benefiting from sharing with each other their problems Wilson and Smith published a book in 1939, Alcoholics Anonymous. Within a few years many other alcoholics were meeting together in AA groups whose purpose is "to stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety." June 10th is the date marked by AA for its anniversaries.

A twelve-step program, a set of guiding principles outlining a course of action for recovery from addiction, was proposed. The Twelve Steps were first published in the 1939 book Alcoholics Anonymous.

Wikipedia

Bill Wilson experimented with LSD and found the experiences to be so life changing that he considered the use of the drug as a step of AA. After the ensuing backlash, he removed himself from the AA governing body.

The first female member Florence Rankin joined AA in March 1937 and the first non-Protestant member, a Roman Catholic, joined in 1939.

The first Black AA group was established in 1945 in Washington DC by Jim S., an African-American physician from Virginia.

In 2014 there were  more than 115,000 AA groups registered throughout the world.

The principles of AA have been used to form many numbers of other fellowships specifically designed for those recovering from various addictions. In 1953 Narcotics Anonymous received permission from AA to use the Twelve Steps in its own program.

Alcohol

HISTORY OF ALCOHOL

Humans must have discovered, in a series of happy accidents, the pleasant side-effects of drinking the fermented juice of grape or grain. The discovery of late Stone Age beer jugs has established that intentionally fermented beverages existed at least as early as the Neolithic period (about 10,000BC).

The earliest evidence of alcohol in China emerged 9,000 years ago when they made it by fermenting rice, honey and fruit. They were wary of its effects and there were frequent attempts to ban alcohol. (41 times between 1100BC and 1400AD).

Workers on the Egyptian pyramids around 4,500 years ago had three drink breaks each day, with five types of beer and four varieties of wine available.

Grape cultivation, winemaking, and commerce in ancient Egypt c. 1500 BC

"Libations," the practice of pouring out alcohol in memory of those who have "passed on" was common in Ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. "Pouring one out for the homies" is a custom over 3,000 years old and is mentioned in the Bible, The Iliad, and The Odyssey.

The Islamic alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan developed the process of distilling to produce alcoholic spirits using fermented fruit juice in the early 9th century. He did this by means of the recently invented still, a tool used to distill mixable liquids by heating and then cooling.

The method of distilling alcohol used by Arabs had reached Europe by the middle of the twelfth century as a result of various European authors translating and popularizing the discoveries of Islamic alchemists.

Despite being banned by the Quran, wine and spirits were drunk by many in Islamic countries during the Middle Ages.

There were at least seven types of alcoholic beverages in the Americas before European contact. One of them was made from pineapple, and another was made from the honey of a domesticated stingless bee.

The Tudors drank an average of a gallon of alcohol a day.

The word “alcohol” comes from the Arabic word “al-kohl” meaning  "a powdered ingredient". When it first appeared in English in the 1540s “alcohol” was a fine powder produced by grinding. Its meaning changed from powders produced by distillation to the liquids produced by distillation.

For chemists, the term “alcohol” covers a wide range. The alcohol in drinks is ethyl alcohol.

Alcohol proof is a measure of how much alcohol (ethanol) is contained in an alcoholic beverage. The term originated in the 16th century, when payments to British sailors included rations of rum. To ensure that the rum had not been watered down, it was "proved" by dousing gunpowder with it and then testing to see if the gunpowder would ignite. If it did not, then the rum contained too much water and was considered to be "under proof."

Peter the Great of Russia had the lover of one of his mistresses beheaded and his head preserved in alcohol and kept by his bedside.

The first health warning to appear on a bottle of alcohol was in 1751. It was inspired by London's mid 18th century gin craze.

By 1830, the annual per capita consumption of alcohol by Americans had climbed to more than five gallons. At the time Americans believed liquor was nutritious and stimulated digestion. It was also consumed to help wash down poorly cooked, greasy, salty, and sometimes rancid food.

In the 1830s, a typical American took a healthful dram for breakfast, whiskey was a typical lunchtime tipple, ale accompanied supper and the day ended with a nightcap.

Vin Mariani was a 19th century alcoholic drink that also contained cocaine. Thomas Edison, Ulysses S. Grant and Queen Victoria, all indulged in it, as well as two popes. One of them, Pope Leo XIII, purportedly carried a hipflask of Vin Mariani with him and appeared on a poster endorsing the beverage (see below).

Prohibition, in the form of the 18th amendment, outlawed the sale of alcohol in the United States between 1919-1933.

The first non-alcoholic beer appeared in the United States in 1919 as a result of of the new Prohibition laws.

In Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel Brave New World (where all fetuses are gestated in vitro in a factory), lower caste fetuses receive alcohol transfusions on purpose to reduce intelligence and height and thus condition them for simple, menial tasks. Huxley's descriptions of the effects of alcohol on fetuses predate the scientific recognition of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome by more than four decades.

In 1943 a New Zealander, Morton W Coutts, developed a new quicker technique of fermentation, which was the first major change to brewing for four hundred years. His continuous fermentation process reduced the four-month long brewing process to less than 24 hours.

The 45-foot long V2 rocket carried enough alcohol to make 66,130 dry martinis.

In the US the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 resulted in the minimum age in which alcohol can be publicly consumed being raised to 21.

The US government approved the sale of powdered alcohol beginning the summer of 2015.

FUN ALCOHOL FACTS

Because of the wide availability of soft drinks and fruit juices compared to 150 years ago the average westerner currently consumes considerably less alcohol than he did in Victorian times. However people are drinking considerably more than they did in the decade after the Second World War.

30% of Americans don't drink alcohol at all, 60% drink less than 1 drink a week. The top 10% drink ~74 drinks a week.

A liquor store in the United Kingdom is called an "Off license" because they are licensed to sell liquor for consumption elsewhere, or "off" the premises.

Eighteen cities and seven counties in Indiana have local ordinances banning the sale of alcohol on election day.

The sentence “Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs,” includes all the letters of the alphabet.

One unit of alcohol is the amount the body can process in an hour.

A pint of beer, a glass of wine, and a shot of vodka all contain almost the same amount of alcohol.

It only takes six minutes for brain cells to react to alcohol.

Recent studies have shown that while excessive intake of alcohol kills off brain cells, it attacks the slowest and weakest brain cells first.

The Global Burden of Disease study looked at levels of alcohol use and its health effects in 195 countries between 1990 and 2016. It concluded that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption. The researchers admitted that moderate drinking may protect against heart disease, but found that the risk of cancer and other diseases outweighs these protections

You may think it makes you hotter but alcohol actually lowers the body temperature.

People with lighter eye colors (green, blue, hazel or any light color) have a higher alcohol tolerance than those with darker color eyes.

You'd have to boil a typical can of beer for 30 minutes to make it nonalcoholic.

36% of Asians have Alcohol Flush Reaction. They are more probable to get cancer from drinking alcohol as well as it causing more minor symptoms as nausea, headache and discomfort.

Auto-brewery syndrome is a disease where carbohydrates are converted to alcohol in a person's digestive system, setting them drunk whenever they consume carbs.

Alcohol feels like its burning when applied to wounds. It doesn't physically burn you, but you feel the sensation because the chemical activates the same nerve receptors in your skin that let you know boiling water or a flame are hot.

The average human gut naturally produces 3 grams of alcohol a day through fermentation. Over the course of a year this is the equivalent alcohol of about two full bottles of whiskey.

Alcohol breath is not from the stomach, rather it's from the ethanol diffusing out of the blood in the lungs.

Alcohol is not exclusively a terrestrial matter. Astronomers found out there is a lot alcohol in space as well. In 1995, a huge cloud 288 billion miles (463.5 billion kms) wide was found in space near the constellation Aquila. There is enough alcohol in it to make 400 trillion trillion pints of beer.

In Australia when it gets very hot, the nectar in some flowers ferments and turns into alcohol. The bees get "drunk" and are not allowed back into the hive.

The animal that drinks the most alcohol is the Malaysian pen-tailed tree-shrew. They spend several hours per night consuming the equivalent of 10 to 12 glasses of wine drinking naturally fermented nectar of the bertam palm.

Around the globe, Russians are amongst the heaviest drinkers, with the average adult consuming over twice the recommended amount every day. As a result, 500,000 of them die each year of alcohol-related diseases.

Home-brewed liquor, or moonshine, accounts for almost 30% of the world's alcohol drinking.

Methylated spirits, which is sold in hardware stores for use as a solvent and as fuel for alcohol burners and camping stoves isn't chemically different from drinking alcohol. The only difference is it's purposely laced with poison and nausea inducing additives so you can't drink it. This compromises allows it to be sold without alcohol tax and ensures people don't use it as a beverage.

Here's some songs about alcohol

Sources Metro Newspaper, Daily Express, Britain In Numbers: The Essential Statistics by Simon Briscoe

Alchemy

The first reference to alchemy, the search for an elixir of immortal life, was made by a Chinese Taoist in approx 140BC. These early alchemists were seeking to convert other metals into gold, not to create wealth, but as a step towards discovering the recipe for eternity. Among their experiments were an attempt to develop an immortality pill through refining mercury sulphide: The use of this poisonous substance lead to many deaths, including Tang emperors.

The phrase "talk gibberish" alludes to the Persian scientist and alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan (c. 721 – c. 815), whose name was latinised as geber. Gibberish referred to the incomprehensible jargon he used when describing how to turn base metals into gold.

In the 9th century Chinese alchemists in search of the elixir of life created a mixture of saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal. Ironically, short of a path to immortality, they had discovered gunpowder.

The medieval alchemists failed to form gold out of cheaper metals. However, in the process of searching, they discovered the strong acids: sulfuric acid, nitric acid and hydrochloric acid - substances much more useful to modern industry than gold could possibly be.

The Alchemist in Search of the Philosopher's Stone, by Joseph Wright, 1771

Had the medieval alchemists learned how to make gold out of lead, it would have been an economic failure. The large increase in the gold supply would have decreased its value.

During the 4th Parliament of King Henry IV, which met at Westminster Palace from January 14, 1404 until  March 20, 1404, they signed into law the Gold and Silver Act 1403 or Multipliers Act 1403 or Alchemy Act 1403, forbidding alchemists from turning base metals into gold. It was repealed by Royal Mines Act 1688, 

Sir Isaac Newton, who revolutionized mathematics and physics, spent almost as much time writing about and studying alchemy, and firmly believed in its viability as a science.

James Price was an English chemist and Fellow of the Royal Society who gained attention in the early 1780s by claiming he could transmute mercury into silver or gold using a special “powder.” At first, his demonstrations seemed convincing enough to impress local gentry and even some scientists — though not his more skeptical peers at the Royal Society.

When the Society demanded that he repeat his experiment under proper supervision at their laboratory in London, Price delayed, made excuses, and finally agreed to a public demonstration at his home in Guildford in August 1783. But instead of performing the experiment, he shocked his guests by drinking prussic acid (hydrogen cyanide) — a deadly poison — and died almost instantly.

In 1980, nuclear physicist Glenn Seaborg transmuted several thousand atoms of bismuth into gold at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. His experimental technique, using nuclear physics, was able to remove protons and neutrons from the bismuth atoms. Seaborg's technique would have been far too expensive to enable routine manufacturing of gold, but his work was close to the mythical Philosopher's Stone.