Delirium Tremens - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

• Writer Jack Kerouac details his experiences with delirium tremens in his book Big Sur.
• In the 1945 film The Lost Weekend, an alcoholic writer, played by Ray Milland, is admitted to a hospital's alcoholic ward in the throes of delirium tremens.
• In the 1962 film Days of Wine and Roses, public relations man Joe Clay (played by Jack Lemmon) is committed to a sanitorium twice. In the first instance, he is held in a straitjacket and in a padded room while experiencing delirium tremens. In the second instance, Joe is committed after breaking into a liquor store and afterwards wakes in the sanitorium, strapped down to a table and sweating profusely, whereupon his Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor Jim Hungerford (played by Jack Klugman) informs him that "For two days there was a little green man chasing you around with pruning shears."
• In the 2003 film The Last Samurai, Nathan Algren (Tom Cruise), a disenchanted ex-United States Army captain and an alcoholic, who is traumatized by his experience fighting in the Civil War and the Indian Wars, is treated by the Hirotaro family in the throes of delirium tremens after being captured in battle with samurai troops led by Katsumoto.
• In the film Leaving Las Vegas, the main character, Ben Sanderson (Nicolas Cage), suffers from the DTs after a drinking binge, and rushes to his liquor supply to prevent them from continuing.
• In the novel L'Assommoir (1876), by French author Emile Zola, the husband of the heroine Gervaise, an alcoholic roofer named Coupeau, succumbs to delirium tremens in a Parisian hospital.
• Ethan Thomas, protagonist of the video game Condemned 2, has become an alcoholic since the events of the previous game and must regularly consume whiskey to prevent the violent shaking of his delirium tremens from spoiling his aim.
• The protagonist of Malcolm Lowry's 1947 novel Under the Volcano suffers from delirium tremens.
• In the M*A*S*H episode "Bottoms Up", an alcoholic nurse gets delirium tremens.
• In the film Everything Must Go, the character Nick Halsey (played by Will Ferrell) suffers from delirium tremens in the movie.
• In the "Birthmarks" episode of season 5 of the television series House MD, a patient who is an alcoholic suffers from delirium tremens while being treated in the hospital.