The Past and Future of Physiological Aspects of the Liquor Problem, Vol. 2,edited by John Shaw Billings (1903)

By Hannah Calkins

In 1893, a private research group of elite businessmen, educators, civil servants and scientists convened to address social problems related to alcohol in the United States [1]. They called themselves the “Committee of Fifty for the Investigation of the Liquor Problem.” Between 1893 and 1905, this group split into sub-committees and issued six reports on the physiological, legislative, economic, and ethical aspects of alcohol consumption and abuse. This effort represented “the most comprehensive attempt to study the ‘liquor problem’” of its time [2]. It was also a defensive maneuver. The Committee of Fifty repeatedly emphasized the “scientific, factual, objective, and non-political nature” of their project [3]. But their neutral, open-minded language belied their true intention, which was to neutralize the temperance movement. At the time, the movement had a strong and growing influence among policymakers and the mainstream U.S. public [4].

Of the six reports produced by the Committee of Fifty, the Physiological Sub-Committee’s two-part report was the most controversial, as it made the most overt attack on temperance ideology and teachings [5]. The controversy was largely related to the content in the second volume of the report. Physiological Aspects of the Liquor Problem, vol. 2, was published in 1903. It was edited by John Shaw Billings (1838-1913) [6], who also chaired the Physiological Sub-Committee. The book has three chapters by different authors. Each author presents both research and commentary, all broadly concluding that while alcohol is harmful when consumed excessively on a routine basis, it is safe to drink in moderate amounts, and it may even have medicinal or health value in some circumstances. These claims were direct challenges to the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the primary adversary of the Committee of Fifty. WCTU leaders claimed that alcohol was poisonous in any quantity, that routine consumption would inevitably lead to addiction, and that abstention and Prohibition were the only solutions to these problems [7]. The WCTU developed curricula for schools based on these ideas, which it called “Scientific Temperance Instruction.” By 1901, they had succeeded in getting every state in the US to pass laws requiring temperance ideology to be taught in public schools [8].

The primary controversy around Physiological Aspects of the Liquor Problem, vol. 2, was animated by Wilbur Olin (W.O.) Atwater, who authored the second section of the volume [9]. Atwater was a successful and well-known chemist, and he remains a significant figure in the history of nutrition science [10]. In vol. 2, he made a spectacular challenge to the WCTU by claiming that alcohol was not a poison, but a food. This claim was staked on research he conducted with his “respiration calorimeter,” which he documents in his section. The calorimeter was a temperature-controlled “apparatus” that allowed him to precisely measure how alcohol was metabolized in his subjects. He described it as “a copper walled chamber about seven feet long, four feet wide, and six and one half feet high, in which the man who serves as the subject of the experiment lives during a period of four to twelve days and nights” [11]. During that period, Atwater wrote, he would give his subjects precisely measured amounts of food and drink, including alcohol, and asked them to perform tasks, such as exercise. Then, he would measure the composition of their sweat, blood and other excretions to determine whether alcohol was oxidized during the metabolic process, and was, thus, “food” [12].

But after staking this elaborate effort, and presenting a lengthy, dense analysis in his report, his conclusion lands rather mildly: alcohol has very little value as a nutrient [13]. This was also not an original finding, as others had already proven Atwater’s oxidation hypothesis [14]. But the “poison versus food” debate was always more about semantics than science [15].  The degree of “nutriment” doesn’t appear to matter much to Atwater, and he supports his analysis with largely anecdotal illustrations of people subsisting on alcohol and little else, which means that it cannot be poison [16].           

Vol. 2 has two additional sections. The first section, by John J. Abel, is a critical review of existing research on the pharmacological effect of alcohol (in any amount) on the body and, to an extent, the mind [17]. In the final section, William H. Welch focuses on the pathological effects of alcohol, examining prior research on how excessive consumption of alcohol affects human and animal bodies [18]. These sections, like Atwater’s, demonstrate the Committee of Fifty’s investment in establishing a distinction between moderate, benign alcohol consumption and excessive, dangerous alcohol consumption. They were attempting to draw clear, evidence-based boundaries between what was acceptable (or even beneficial) and what should be considered harmful or pathological. 

From a modern perspective, this sounds like a reasonable and worthwhile goal, perhaps even an unnecessary one, because its conclusions are so obvious to us. This is because the Committee of Fifty’s report was the first “substantial articulation of what would be the distinctive 20^th century framework for viewing the place of alcohol in society” [19]. This is particularly true of the physiological report, in which “there is little hat the contemporary reader will not recognize. Its ‘science’ and its opinions have become the dominant ones” since the repeal of Prohibition [20]. But in the short-term, the Committee of Fifty failed. Despite the ambitious scale of their project, and its elite roster of contributors, it was not successful, and its “work seems to have been almost totally ignored” [21]. The publication of the physiology report “marked the end of the leading scientists’ interest in the liquor problem,” [22] and the temperance movement evolved, grew more powerful, and led the country toward Prohibition. In January 1920, the 18^th amendment went into effect, and the era of Prohibition began [23].             

The time for the Committee of Fifty’s particular style of alcohol control policy had not yet come [24]. But while it may be tempting to cast this fight as one between the “scientific” Committee of Fifty and the “moralistic” WCTU, this characterization fails to recognize the WCTU’s substantial (if flawed) engagement with science [25], as well as the reality of the Committee of Fifty’s goals, which were in fact also moral, not purely scientific, and were at least partly politically motivated. The Physiological Sub-Committee was progressive in some ways: they viewed alcohol consumption, and alcoholism in particular, through a novel scientific and medical lens. Their conclusions—that moderate quantities of alcohol are not inherently dangerous or addictive for most people, and that alcoholism, though a serious medical problem, cannot be prevented by most alcohol laws [26]—are reasonable and enduring. But these men of science were not so different from their temperance activist foes. They simply delivered a new moral message. 

With a calculated semblance of curiosity, Abel delivered this message in the conclusion of the first chapter. “Perhaps only an increasing knowledge of the properties of alcohol, joined with the exercise of that self control [sic] which is humanity’s safeguard against all its vicious tendencies, can effect a fundamental cure of the drink evil,” he wrote [27].
This notion—that excessive drinking is fundamentally an individual problem—is reflected throughout the book. The science, Abel and the other vol. 2. authors argued, shows us that abolishing alcohol is a needlessly extreme response to the unfortunate reality that some people are alcoholics. The “problem” with liquor, they stated in so many ways, is problem drinkers.

This post was written for the course HIST H364/H546 The History of Medicine and Public Health. Instructor: Elizabeth Nelson, School of Liberal Arts, Indiana University Indianapolis.

References

[1] Jonathan Zimmerman, “‘When the Doctors Disagree’: Scientific Temperance and Scientific Authority, 1891–1906,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 48, no. 2 (April 1993): 171–197, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24622802 , 177.

[2] Harry G. Levine, “The Committee of Fifty and the Origins of Alcohol Control,” Journal of Drug Issues 13, no. 1 (1983): 95–116, https://doi.org/10.1177/00220426830130010, 99.

[3] ibid.

[4] Harry G. Levine, “The Discovery of Addiction: Changing Conceptions of Habitual Drunkenness in America,” Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment 2, no. 1 (1978): 43–57, https://www.jsatjournal.com/article/0740-5472(85)90022-4/fulltext, 53; and Jack S. Blocker Jr., “Did Prohibition Really Work?” American Journal of Public Health 96, no. 2 (2006): 233–243, https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2005.065409

[5] Levine, “Committee of Fifty,” 100.

[6] Indiana Historical Bureau, “Dr. John Shaw Billings,” Indiana Historical Markers by County, accessed April 15, 2026, https://www.in.gov/history/state-historical-markers/find-a-marker/find-historical-markers-by-county/indiana-historical-markers-by-county/dr.-john-shaw-billings.

[7] Philip J. Pauly, “The Struggle for Ignorance about Alcohol: American Physiologists, Wilbur Olin Atwater, and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 64, no. 3 (Fall 1990): 366–392, https://www.jstor.org/stable/44442546, 372.

[8] Jonathan Zimmerman, “‘The Queen of the Lobby’: Mary Hunt, Scientific Temperance, and the Dilemma of Democratic Education in America, 1879–1906,” History of Education Quarterly 32, no. 1 (1992): 1–30, https://www.jstor.org/stable/368397, 2.

[9] W. O. Atwater, “The Nutritive Value of Alcohol,” in Physiological Aspects of the Liquor Problem, vol. 2, ed. John S. Billings (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903), 169–349.

[10] Gary R. Beecher et al., “Legacy of Wilbur O. Atwater: Human Nutrition Research Expansion at the USDA—Interagency Development of Food Composition Research,” Journal of Nutrition 139, no. 1 (2009): 178–184, https://doi.org/10.3945/jn.108.095547, 183.

[11] Atwater, “Nutritive Value of Alcohol,” 225.

[12] ibid, 226-229.

[13] ibid, 343.

[14] Pauly, “Struggle for Ignorance,” 383.

[15] Zimmerman, “When the Doctors Disagree,” 178.

[16] Atwater, “Nutritive Value of Alcohol,” 210-214.

[17] John J. Abel, “A Critical Review of the Pharmacological Action of Ethyl Alcohol, with a Statement of the Relative Toxicity of the Constituents of Alcoholic Beverages,” in Physiological Aspects of the Liquor Problem, vol. 2, ed. John S. Billings (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903), 1–168.

[18] William H. Welch, “The Pathological Effects of Alcohol,” in Physiological Aspects of the Liquor Problem, vol. 2, ed. John S. Billings (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903), 349–375.

[19] Levine, “Committee of Fifty,” 97.

[20] ibid, 101.

[21] ibid, 111.

[22] Pauly, “Struggle for Ignorance,” 391.

[23] Jack S. Blocker Jr., “Did Prohibition Really Work?” American Journal of Public Health 96, no. 2 (2006): 233–243, https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2005.065409, 235-236.

[24] Levine, “Committee of Fifty,” 110.

[25] Pauly, “Struggle for Ignorance,” and Zimmerman, “When the Doctors Disagree.”

[26] Levine, “Committee of Fifty,” 110-111.

[27] Abel, “Critical Review of the Pharmacological Action,” 167.