Weird Hangover Cures Through the Ages

Throughout history, people have done all sorts of weird things involving animals in the hopes of curing a hangover. It is said that the epic drinkers of Outer Mongolia pickled the eyeballs of sheep, horse wranglers in the Wild West made tea out of rabbit shit, and my Welsh ancestors roasted the lungs of a pig—all very literally. But the most common remedy has always been figurative: to pluck a hair of the dog that bit you.That catchy metaphor goes back to at least 400 BCE, when Antiphanes wrote these words (or at least their equivalent in ancient Greek). And they appear to be riffing on something even earlier:

Take the hair, it is well written,
Of the dog by which you’re bitten,
Work off one wine by his brother,
One labor with another.

Thanks to Antiphanes’s contemporary Hippocrates, the forefather of both the Hippocratic oath and homeopathy, it was a concept popular to all forms of medical treatment: fight fire with fire, yet do no harm. A tricky combination, but one that people have been attempting forever. And of course, it wasn’t just hangovers that were treated with alcohol. Hippocrates devised an elaborate system of wine therapy, prescribing different types for different ailments and incorporating it into the regimen for almost all chronic and acute illness.

Galen the Greek, who served in the court of Marcus Aurelius, brought Hippocrates’s methods to the Roman Empire. Prolific as Pliny, he published two and a half million words in his life-time, much of it about wine therapy. Amidst a hundred other wine-soaked remedies, he used it to treat the wounds of gladiators, and apparently not one of them died from infection—from decapitation, disembowelment and hungry lions, sure, but not from infection.

By the 11th century, medieval healers were still looking to Hippocrates, Galen and other ancient doctors whose teachings had been translated by monks into Latin and compiled into the great medical tome Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum. This compendium of all medical knowledge prescribed wine and other alcoholic beverages for everything from indigestion to insanity. And it tells you exactly what to do should you exceed the recommended dose. “If you develop a hangover from drinking at night, drink again in the morning. It will be your best medicine.”

It was a concept popular to all forms of medical treatment: fight fire with fire, yet do no harm. A tricky combination, but one that people have been attempting forever.

And of course, booze was the least questionable ingredient in many curative elixirs. The Dispensatorium Pharmacorum, a medical dictionary from the mid-16th century, contains recipes that combine wine with ingredients such as the ashes of scorpions, dog excrement and wolf’s liver. And an article from The London Distiller in 1667 explains how to make an apparently well-known tonic from a crushed human skull: “Take the Cranium-Humanum as you please, break it into small pieces . . . then put string fire to it by degrees, continuing until you see no more fumes come forth; and you shall have a yellowish spirit, a red Oyl, and a volatile salt.” The resulting liquor is supposed to help with “the falling-sickness, Gout, Dropsie, infirm Stomach; and indeed strengthens all weak parts, and openeth all obstructions, and is a kind of Panacea.”

If, however, your hangovers tend to be accompanied by tinges of remorse, you might want to avoid getting drunk on crushed human skull. But then again, there’s always this for the morning after, from Andy Toper’s list of ancient hangover cures: “In Old Europe it was widespread to cultivate moss inside a skull, dry it, powder it, then snort it”—a bit of the skull that bit you.

It is also possible that, at certain times and places in history, whole towns, cities and civilizations never got a chance to be hungover—they just kept a slight buzz going all day, then into the next, apparently without a lick of guilt.

Today, it is this aspect—the degree to which your hangover makes you feel guilty—that may decide what kind of hair of the dog you choose: a warm, stale beer, a spicy Bloody Caesar or one of countless cocktails invented specifically for this purpose. Such concoctions tend to come in two overarching categories: sweet, soft soothers meant to ease you back to baseline with something milky, fruity, relaxing and restorative (these have names like Morning Glory, Milk of Human Kindness and Mother’s Little Helper), or short, sharp shocks intended to twist your system into sobriety with bitterness, blinding heat and/or gag reflex (Khan’s Curse, Suffering Bastard, Guy Fawkes’s Explosion . . .).

Historically, this second variety could contain anything from anchovies to ammonia, garlic to gunpowder. As Clement Freud (sounding more than a little like his overly analytical uncle) puts it, such tonics also “sublimate any guilt feelings” by subjecting an already remorseful bastard to a more precise moment of suffering: “Liquid cures of this type,” he opines, “owe much of their effectiveness to the popular belief that anything that tastes really disgusting must actually do you good.”

But guilt feelings aside, does a hair of the dog make practical sense? Sure it does, and always has. Even the National Institutes of Health in the US admit that “the observation that alcohol readministration alleviates the unpleasantness of both AW (alcohol withdrawal) and hangovers suggest that the two experiences share a common process.”

At certain times and places in history, whole towns, cities and civilizations never got a chance to be hungover—they just kept a slight buzz going all day, then into the next, apparently without a lick of guilt.

But in regards to “readministration,” those in such institutes also warn you should never, ever do it, lest you turn into a certified drunk. In 2009, Dutch researcher Dr. Joris Verster published a paper addressing precisely this. “The ‘Hair of the Dog’: A Useful Hangover Remedy or a Predictor of Future Problem Drinking?” was based on a survey of Dutch undergrads. It revealed, among other things, that those who used alcohol as a morning-after treatment consumed approximately three times as much alcohol, and that those who did so more often had “a significantly higher lifetime alcohol dependence diagnosis.” But of course, there’s an aspect of chicken-and-egginess to all of this. And also, Verster’s paper never did tackle the first part of the question: “A Useful Hangover Remedy?”

The hair of the dog may, in fact, work in ways we never imagined. In Proof, Adam Rogers’s excellent recent book about the science of alcohol, the author suggests that “ethanol might help with a hangover because it stops the body from breaking down methanol.” As Rogers explains it, ethanol is the magical essence of alcohol, while methanol is a nasty molecule that, at low levels, sneaks into most alcoholic drinks and, at high levels, might just kill you. Broken down, it becomes the poison known as formaldehyde. While recognizing that some studies dismiss its effects, Rogers concludes that “one piece of evidence is suggestive: the relative efficacy of the ‘hair of the dog’—drinking more booze.”

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It is likely—in fact, probable—that one Frank M. Paulsen of Wayne State University has cataloged more hairs of the dog than anyone else in history. In 1960, Paulsen went in search of the elusive hangover cure—or, at least, the myths surrounding it. His research was exhaustive, yet inspiringly rough-and-tumble. He traveled to dive bars, roadhouses and nightclubs in Detroit, Cleveland, Montpelier, Buffalo, Utica, Omaha, Los Angeles, Quebec, Montreal and Toronto. And he asked for people’s advice.

Guilt feelings aside, does a hair of the dog make practical sense? Sure it does, and always has.

Many of his subjects remained anonymous, since, in his words: “I was unable (or thought it unwise as the case might be) to ask for names and biographical information from over half my informants. The subject matter of the cures and the places where they were collected should justify this high degree of anonymity.”

The resulting study, “A Hair of the Dog and Some Other Hangover Cures from Popular Tradition,” was published the following year in the Journal of American Folklore, and nowhere else since. It is 18 pages of poetical brilliance: as if Charles Bukowski and Tom Waits sat down to write a story or a song together, then got very, very sidetracked.

Paulsen has a way with people. You can see them opening up to him with a laugh, and you can smell the gin on their breath. And he seems to have hit on a sort of apex in the history of morning-after drinks. Here are a mere five of the 261 hairs he found on his big dog trip—along with descriptions of his interviewees, which, a half century later, thanks to Paulsen’s poetic precision, are just as telling as what they had to say:

Cut a big piece of watermelon, if you can get hold of one, and punch holes in the meat with a fork. Pour half a pint of gin over that and eat it down. Be careful of the seeds; they’ll kill ya.

—Mr. Meschner, Hawkins Bar, Detroit. Retired; white, male, about 70; born and raised in Detroit, where he worked for the Ford Motor Company for some 50 years; now spends most of his time wandering from bar to bar in the northwestern section of Detroit; quite active for a man his age.

Eat a white Bermuda onion like an apple. Wait half an hour, then take a good shot.

—George Gust, Club 58, Cleveland. Restaurant and bar owner, white, male, about 28; of Greek extraction.

A shot and a beer—a stale beer if you’ve got any. Break a couple eggs and put them in the beer. Don’t eat the eggs. Let [the hangover] fight itself out. But if you get hungry after a couple of doses, eat the eggs.

—Anonymous, Webb Wood Inn. Occupation unknown; white, male, about 65; apparently quite a heavy drinker.

Take cold, jellied consommé and mix in some Worcestershire, celery salt, garlic powder, and about four ounces of vodka. Your secretary will hate you, but you’ll be able to get through till lunch.

—Anonymous, Club 58, Detroit. General Motors executive; white, male, about 45.

Mix cinnamon in wine and sip on it. Any kind of sweet wine will do.

—George Fonte, Club 58, Buffalo. Bartender; white, male, about 45; born and reared in Wisconsin; has been tending bar, mostly at exclusive private clubs for 20 years; he was my most cooperative and informative informant. (Fonte also suggested: milk; lemon sherbet; mashed strawberries and sugar dressed with egg whites, gin and chartreuse; a whisky sour; salty dogs; an orange blossom; a shot of vodka mixed with equal parts tomato juice and clam juice; sherry mixed with an egg yolk and served at room temperature; a shot of Pernod mixed with an egg white and four dashes of bitters; and warm seltzer water mixed with bitters.)

It is worth noting that Mr. Fonte really knows his hangover stuff—even earmarking a rendition of the Bloody Caesar, which, to this day, you can usually find only in Canada. But this last one is my absolute favorite (even though the hair of the dog is just slipped in at the very end). You know when people ask, “Who, in history, would you like to have dinner with?” This one is my guy—either him or Lauren Bacall:

You’ve asked the right man. I sell the cause; I got the cure. When you wake up that way, first go to the store. I mean go to the store, Dad. You open that icebox door, get talking to the lettuce, and you could get mixed up with the milk bottles. That’s not good. Buy an avocado, not a hard one, not a soft one. It’s got to be just right—tender to the touch, but not too easy. When you get it home, peel it, but peel it gently, so there’s plenty of green left. Cut it in slivers, if your hand’s steady enough. Salt it light, ever so light. It’s better to use your right hand if you’re right-handed and you haven’t cut yourself yet. Eat that, like it is. Never chill it. It’s hard enough to taste it as it is. No, I’m not kidding, eat the avocado. Then you have sex—you know, nothing in bad taste, not fast, not vulgar. Take your time. Lie there a little while; catch a little shut-eye if you can. By no means go again. After you’re back down on the ground, I mean really down and relaxed, get up and step into the shower. The water’s got to be just right—not too hot, not too cold, just right. Spend a half hour there if you got to. When you step out, walk up to the mirror. Shave. Then use that sexy lotion. You walk out feeling new. You’re ready for your first drink of the day.

—John Leon, St. Paul Hotel, Los Angeles, California (by correspondence). Bar manager; white, male, about 35; born and reared in Los Angeles; of Mexican extraction; has been tending bar for 13 years.

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From Hungover: The Morning After and One Man’s Quest for the Cure. Courtesy of Penguin Books. Copyright 2018 by Shaugnessy Bishop-Stall.