Selden Daskam Bacon (10 September 1909 in Pleasantville, New York – 6 December 1992 in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts)[1] was a Yale professor of sociology and an alcoholism researcher.
[3] 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 interest in alcohol studies began when the Connecticut War Council asked him to do a study that compared people in jail for alcohol-related charges to those for other charges, because of a perceived lack of manpower during the war due to drunkenness arrests.
In 1945, he published a review on the movie The Lost Weekend, whose main character was an alcoholic, in the Yale Center's journal.
[6] He died of a heart attack at age 83 at Martha's Vineyard, where his retirement home was located.