For over 130 years, our culture has been fascinated with a sensational true tale: the brutal murder of five women, all labeled prostitutes, dismissed and devalued.

How this story evolved — as our understanding of the cultural forces at play did too — is reminiscent of any long-held story of belief that is reexamined. This includes scientific knowledge. In short, it takes a brand new perspective, and often, these ideas need time to break through long-held beliefs.

Who were these women? Only one was a prostitute. In Hallie Rubenhold’s book The Five, we learn more than just their names: Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Kate Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly. Thanks to Rubenhold’s careful research, they step forward as the real wives, mothers, and daughters they were prior to their gruesome deaths at the hands of Jack the Ripper.

For years, this story has focused on the murderer. His repetitive crimes. His taunting. His wily evasion of justice and his trip into a perverse kind of lasting superstardom.

We all thought we knew the story. But we only knew a story, and largely one side of it.

Central to the real story are time and place. With a modern perspective, we can better understand the cultural circumstances surrounding the era and how that contributed to our storytelling about it. The victims lived in an era where a stroke of bad luck easily led to grinding poverty and survival on the streets. 

Worse, the awful situation was usually made permanent because women had no rights. They had to make atrocious tradeoffs to feed their starving children, eat, or find a place to sleep. Only one was a known prostitute, but they were all exceedingly desperate.

And notably, the stress of this hellscape drove all of these victims to drink. 

Stress is a known contributor to behavioral or substance use, abuse, and addiction. Whether the stress is acute or chronic, originating in childhood or crushing adulthood, stress displacement is the forcing function that brings on addiction in whatever form it arises, according to the Unified Theory of Addiction. 

Some may contend that this theory is an oversimplification of a worldwide condition. Or, that this point of view doesn’t sufficiently disprove competing theories. But when we’re talking about addiction, its causes, and its cures, aren’t we also comparing theories, which, at root, are also cultural stories with boundaries of what is and isn’t acceptable? And when and how do these stories change?

Let’s return to the earlier-mentioned women and our collective understanding of who they were (prostitutes) and what they did (drink). The story was told one way for a very long time. 

Dear reader, it will not surprise you to learn that society finds little sympathy for those deemed complicit in their own demise. Victim blaming is easy. So let me be crystal clear: The alcohol use (or even abuse) by these victims is not to blame for their deaths; only the murderer is responsible for that. But, alcohol and sex work played a role in a lack of understanding these women more fully. Until recently, no one really examined these women as real people. Culturally, we were, and largely still are, stuck with the story that glorified the murderer.

The act of reexamining “what we know” and the stories we tell brings us science, and, specifically, metascience.

Metascience is the study of science itself. It is a comparatively recent field, and it uses the scientific method to improve the quality and effectiveness of research. Among the big questions metascience is asking: How do we evaluate new ideas that are outside dominant research paradigms? How do we know when groundbreaking insight arrives? What are the signals? How do new ideas spread through the research community? 

In other words, metascience aims to validate or negate commonly held practices and beliefs, sometimes shifting the stories we tell about how insights arise.

Artificial intelligence is making it easier to look at scientific studies at scale. This, in turn, makes it easier to visualize the moment when one study or one paper — sometimes years after publication — suddenly triggered a domino effect, reshaping the direction of research and ultimately upending a commonly held belief.    

Spotting this sort of innovation sounds straightforward until you consider all the baked-in barriers: what basic research is funded and who is doing the research. Ailments thought to be self-inflicted, like obesity or lung cancer or addiction, may experience additional basic funding headwinds and established beliefs. This, in turn, incentifies researchers to keep their investigations inside a hardened status quo. 

To accurately see the lives of the five women mentioned in the introduction, an established story must be taken apart, examined, reconsidered, and retold. To change scientific consensus, methods must be tested, validated, and peer-reviewed. And to properly measure what science works and evaluate how new ideas take hold, we apply those same examination principles to science itself. All of these are ongoing.

In this sense, the study of addiction is like any other research subject. Changes in our understanding happen gradually, over time. We share a collective understanding of a story that explains how it works. Until, that is, an insight arrives unexpectedly, late at night, with mythmaking to follow.

Written by Katie McCaskey. First published July 14, 2026.

Sources:

“The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed By Jack the Ripper,” Hallie Rubenhold, 2019.

“The Unified Theory of Addiction,” Dr. Pretlow, Qeios, March 9, 2023.

“The right to treatment for self-inflicted conditions,” Journal of Medical Ethics, August 16, 2010.

Image Copyright: peshkova.