The lessons of Pascasius, or deconstructing addiction

The rediscovery of the treatise De Alea... by Pascasius Justus on the pathology of gambling offers a new perspective on the history of addiction: this medical text, dating back to 1561, presents an explanatory model and proposes a treatment that closely resembles contemporary conceptions. This raises two important questions addressed in this article. On the one hand, the neglect of Pascasius—both in medical literature and in debates about gambling and its regulation—revives the discussion about the relevance of the concept of disease when applied to addiction. On the other hand, the very existence of the treatise shows that ancient texts, which were Pascasius’s only theoretical sources, contained sufficient elements to construct an “addiction-as-disease” model, suggesting that addiction cannot simply be regarded as a “temporary mental illness.”