William Hogarth, Unwitting Neurochemist?

Abstract

William Hogarth's famous etching Gin Lane is often used to illustrate the debilitating results of alcohol addiction. Less well known is the companion etching Beer Street in which death, murder and squalor are replaced by health, orderliness and joy. Some 250 years later, the rise of science, and specifically of neurochemical research, has defined how the malnutrition, including avitaminosis, resulting from addiction to distilled spirits (rather than more judicious use of less potent alcoholic beverages) disturbs brain metabolism and function. These two etchings, which have survived for their historical and artistic value, continue to have sociological and clinical relevance.