Selden D. Bacon

Selden Daskam Bacon (10 September 1909 in Pleasantville, New York – 6 December 1992 in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts) was a Yale professor of sociology and an alcoholism researcher. He was director of the Center of Alcohol Studies at Rutgers University from 1962 to 1975. Together with E. Morton Jellinek and Howard W. Haggard, he was an important developer of the disease model of alcohol addiction in the 1940s. His father, Selden Bacon, was a constitutional attorney who argued against the constitutionality of Prohibition (the 18th amendment) in the Supreme Court of the United States. He taught sociology at Pennsylvania State College (today Penn State University) from 1937 to 1939 and then at Yale. He became full professor at Yale in 1956.

After his contact with Yale researchers at the Laboratory of Applied Physiology (LAP), which later became the Yale Center of Alcohol Studies, he was invited to join as a part-time researcher and part-time sociology instructor. In 1945, he published a review on the movie The Lost Weekend, whose main character was an alcoholic, in the Yale Center's journal. He was appointed director of the LAP and the Summer School of Alcohol Studies from 1950 to 1962. He was also a chairperson to the Connecticut Commission on Alcoholism. In 1962, the Center and Bacon as its director moved to Rutgers University. He retired in 1975.

Selected publications