How did investigations into spontaneous human combustion influence alcohol medicine? An examination of the medical and literary discussions that brought the two together

The development of new theories about the action of alcohol on the body and mind appears to have been influenced by the now-discredited eighteenth- and nineteenth-century idea that the phenomenon of human combustion, spontaneous or not, was linked to spirit drinking. As an extreme example of the consequences of heavy drinking, spontaneous human combustion was used to underpin early theories on the clinical chemistry of alcohol.