Jellinek, E. M. (1890–1963)

Following repeal of the National Prohibition Act, the United States began the shift from a moral to a scientific approach to alcohol problems, emphasizing a disease concept of alcoholism and treatment for alcoholics. E. M. Jellinek was at the forefront of this change, helping to shape the policies and programs of the new alcoholism movement during the 1940s and 1950s. Through his work with the Research Council on Problems of Alcohol, the Yale Section of Alcohol Studies, and the World Health Organization (WHO), he influenced and helped disseminate the work of alcohol researchers and treatment professionals around the world.

Born in New York City, Jellinek was raised in Hungary and educated at the Universities of Berlin, Leipzig, and Grenoble. His studies ranged from philosophy and theology to language and linguistics, but his claims to various degrees from European and Latin American universities have been impossible to verify. Leaving Hungary in the 1920s, he spent several years in Sierra Leone before taking a job with the United Fruit Company in Honduras. In 1931, he returned to the United States to become Director of the Biometrie Laboratory at the Memorial Foundation for Neuroendocrine Research in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he studied the neuroendocrine effects of schizophrenia.

Jellinek was nearly 50 years old when he accepted an offer in 1938 from the Research Council on Problems of Alcohol—an association of concerned researchers and physicians. He directed a major review of the existing research literature on the effects of alcohol on the individual. When the funding ended in 1941, Howard Haggard, Director of the Laboratory of Applied Physiology at Yale University, brought Jellinek and the project to Yale and made him Managing Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol, which Haggard had founded in 1940. Jellinek subsequently coauthored several review articles as well as two monographs, stemming from the literature review project.

At Yale, Jellinek quickly rose to a leadership position in the Laboratory of Applied Physiology. In 1943, with Haggard, he founded and directed the Yale School of Alcohol Studies, the first program to train alcoholism professionals. He also established the Yale Plan Clinics, the first outpatient alcoholism treatment programs. In 1944, with Marty Mann, the first woman to recover in Alcoholics Anonymous, he sponsored the creation of the National Committee for Education on Alcoholism. This program became a major tool for raising public awareness about the disease of alcoholism. When Haggard established a formal section of alcohol studies within the Yale laboratory in 1943, he named Jellinek as director.

During his career at Yale, Jellinek developed his own research interests, mainly in the area of epidemiology. He made various attempts to quantify the numbers of alcoholics, primarily based on liver cirrhosis deaths, which ultimately led to the Jellinek Estimation Formula, published by the WHO in 1951. He also assisted in a survey conducted by Alcoholics Anonymous to determine the course of alcoholism. His analysis, supplemented with subsequent survey data, led to his classic publication in 1952 describing the phases of alcohol addiction.

Jellinek left Yale in 1948 to set up a similar research institute at Texas Christian University. Without sufficient financial support, the venture failed in 1951. By that time, he had moved on to Geneva as consultant to the new Alcoholism Subcommittee of the WHO's Expert Committee on Mental Health. There he renewed his epidemiological work, using his estimation formula to help calculate alcoholism problems in various European and Latin American countries. He also convinced the WHO to disseminate abstracts from Yale's alcohol literature review project to research centers around the world.

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