"Alcoholism" as a disease was not even evident until 1849, in a medical text by Swedish Doctor Magnus Huss ("Alcholismus Chronicus"). Until that point (and I'm speaking from a modern European perspective), the over-consumption of alcohol was seen as a moral failing rather than a medical one.

To be sure, people believed that there were medical consequences to inebriation, and even chronic inebriation. Lamarckian conceptions of heredity even theorized that chronic consumers would pass along bad habits to their children. People knew that frequent inebriation over the course of many years could lead to delerium tremens, insanity, and death. In France at least, hospitals began accepting patients in the 1860s/1870s for long-term care of these consequences of chronic alcoholism, but they still didn't see it - as we do now - as an addiction.

There were some who believed that chronic inebriation could lead to human combustion. Now, in more rational circles, they reasoned like this: if you drink constantly, or have drank a lot in one sitting, your body has absorbed a lot of alcohol. Alcohol is flammable. So, if you introduce an open flame to the alcohol-saturated tissues of a drinker, there is a chance that these tissues could ignite. Coupled with the fact that people pass out after a long session of drinking, it was possible that they could not notice their body burning until it was too late. The "reported cases" of human combustion were never witnessed by anyone, so there's no way to tell...

There were even some theorists, like the German Max Nordau, that believed chronic alcohol use was contributing to the decline of humanity. In his 1892 book "Degeneration," he theorized that a society-wide illness he called degeneration was causing people to reject tradition, turn away from salubrious human activities like reproduction (yes, he says homosexuality is a symptom of degeneration), and that alcoholism is one of the ways that degeneration is passed down from generation to generation.

Nordau's theory is interesting, because while he claimed to be clinical and medical in his analysis, we would now qualify what he described as "moral" or just plain cultural. Many of the theories around drinking also saw the problem as a moral one. One doctor, Marie-Hubert Aviat, considered that the problem with alcohol was not the amount or the frequency it was consumed, but the PLACES and the QUALITY of the alcohol. Meaning that if you drank a bottle of wine with your family at home, you were healthier than if you had drank that bottle alone at a bar. Drinking a good wine was preferable to drinking bad wine.

You can sort of see how the 19th century began the debate about alcoholism that we are still discussing today. Drinking alone is certainly an indicator of alcoholism. Drinking can certainly negatively affect your offspring - if you drink during pregnancy. People who drink more are more likely to drink poorer-quality alcohol due to cost.

I hope that helps answer your question...