Potomania is an abnormally intense craving for alcohol, from the Latin potare (to drink) and Greek mania. The term appears in older medical literature describing the compulsive drinking drive of alcoholism, distinct from social or habitual drinking by its urgency and loss of control. A specific modern usage is beer potomania, a dangerous dilutional hyponatraemia occurring in chronic heavy beer drinkers with poor food intake: beer is very low in sodium and solutes, so massive consumption with little food overwhelms the kidneys’ ability to excrete free water, dropping blood sodium to seizure-inducing levels. Treatment requires careful, slow sodium correction. The word has faded from psychiatric classification, replaced by alcohol use disorder, but it captures the obsessive, driven quality of addictive drinking that modern terminology sometimes sanitises.