A Hodgepodge of Hangover History

Humans probably started fermenting things on purpose by about 10,000 BCE. But when did they start discussing the aftereffects that come from drinking too much?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Tracy V. Wilson?

  Deanna Flores is a flag football star, a trailblazer, an entrepreneur, and now host of a new podcast. In Born to Become with Deanna Flores, she's sitting down with people from every corner of culture to find the whole person behind the public identity. Every episode, you'll get to know Deanna, her guests, and even yourself a little better. No lectures, no know-it-all hosts, just real people being real. Listen to Born to Become with Deanna Flores, out now on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Created in partnership with Geico. A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host

• 0:45Tracy V. Wilson?

  Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx, listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:06Speaker 02

  This is the story of the one. As a shipping manager, he's running the dock, stocking supplies, and making sure every order goes out on time. And Grainger helps him stay prepared. From shipping supplies to PPE to hand tools, he counts on Grainger to keep products moving and trucks rolling. So his operation runs smoothly, no matter the shift. Call 1-800-GRAINGER, click Grainger.com, or just stop by. Grainger, for the ones who get it done.

• 1:37Tracy V. Wilson?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 1:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And I'm Holly Frey. It is New Year's Day. If you're listening to this episode on the day that it's coming out, so we're going to talk about hangovers in history. No reason. Happy New Year. It is likely that hangovers predate humanity. Alcoholic beverages start with yeast breaking down sugar from foods like honey or fruit, producing ethanol and carbon dioxide. The species of yeast most associated with this fermentation is Saccharomyces cerevisiae, also called brewer's yeast or baker's yeast, although there are others. Yeast has been around for hundreds of millions of years, although it's less certain when

• 2:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  these particular yeasts developed. But fruit has been around for at least 80 million years. Once fruit and these yeasts existed at the same time and place, there would have been opportunities for natural fermentation. People who live near orchards or vineyards or places with lots of fruit around often have stories about animals becoming intoxicated after eating fermented fruit. Our long ago ancestors may have witnessed this and decided to try it for themselves, or they may have just happened to eat fermented fruit and discovered that it had an effect on them. But logically, if they ate enough of it, they could have woken up the next day with

• 3:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  symptoms like a headache, nausea, sensitivity to light and sound, fatigue, and anxiety, or a sense of dread. Those symptoms that together today are known as a hangover. Based on residues on pottery fragments, humans had probably started fermenting things on purpose by about 10,000 BCE, although there's some debate about whether intentional fermentation started with fruit or honey to make wine or mead. Archaeologists have also found a recurring pattern in several parts of the world in which the first evidence of people fermenting grains to make beer followed those people transitioning from being nomadic to forming sedentary agricultural communities.

• 4:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  This has led to some debate on whether people turned to agriculture to get access to more grains so they could brew beer, or if they discovered the alcoholic potential of grains after first becoming an agricultural society.

• 4:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  Regardless, though, people from virtually every part of the world have been making some kind of alcoholic beverage for thousands of years. So it seems likely that people have experienced hangovers for all of that time. Distilling has also been around for thousands of years, although it probably started out being used to make medicines and perfumes instead of spirituous liquors. There's documentation of wines being distilled into spirits in multiple parts of the world by around the year 800. Logically, access to beverages with a higher concentration of alcohol may also have led to more hangovers.

• 4:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  We keep saying things like logically and probably because hangovers are tricky to study. We don't actually know for sure if fermented fruit would have caused hangovers in our early hominid ancestors. But if their physiology was similar enough to ours and they ate enough of it, it seems likely. The first medical descriptions of a hangover may be in the Sushruta Samhita, which was written in Sanskrit in the 6th century BCE, and it's one of the foundational texts of Ayurveda. We talked about the Sushruta Samhita in our episode on Sushruta in 2019. In the Sushruta Samhita, the condition was called paramata, and it was described as

• 5:38Tracy V. Wilson?

  involving thirst, head and joint pain, a sense of heaviness in the body, and the loss of taste. The Nsinger Papyrus, which dates to around the 1st century BCE in Egypt, describes someone who has drunk too much wine as keeping to bed with aching hair. Today, thousands of years later, there's still not an exact medical understanding of hangovers. A lot of things seem like they're probably involved, like alcohol is a diuretic, so people can become dehydrated after drinking. Alcohol also causes inflammation, and with heavy alcohol use, this can be systemic. Alcohol consumption can cause blood sugar to drop, and that can cause symptoms like

• 6:22Tracy V. Wilson?

  tiredness or shakiness. People often don't sleep as well if they've been drinking, and that interrupted sleep can play a part, too. Alcohol breaks down into a number of metabolites, some of which are toxic, and those metabolites have their own effects on the body's symptoms. There are also some parallels between hangover symptoms and withdrawal symptoms in people who have a history of misusing alcohol. Although withdrawal can also include symptoms that are a lot more serious, like seizures or hallucinations. So, there is also an idea that a hangover could be a very mild withdrawal.

• 7:04Tracy V. Wilson?

  But there's not much medical research into what specifically is going on in the body, or how a hangover impacts a person's physical and cognitive functioning while it's going on. One reason is that it's possible for someone to develop a hangover after drinking only a small amount of alcohol, but hangovers are generally more likely with heavier consumption. There are also a lot of factors that can affect a person's susceptibility to hangovers, including genetics, how often a person drinks, various other habits they may have, medications they may be on, the ingredients in their drinks, or the kinds of alcohol they're drinking. The variables just go on and on.

• 7:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  And there are some ethical issues around intentionally having someone drink enough to try to give them a hangover, especially since alcohol has very well-known, very well-established negative health effects, including being a known carcinogen. The historical record on hangovers can also be tricky to try to pick through. Alcoholic beverages have existed in virtually all of the world for pretty much all of recorded history, and in a lot of places even before. Attitudes about alcohol are really all over the place, and these attitudes change and evolve over time. By extension, the same is true about the after-effects of alcohol consumption.

• 8:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  So, as an example, in a culture where there are strong taboos against alcohol consumption, there might not be much documentation on people's drinking habits or their after-effects beyond condemning people who drink. Or, in a culture in which most people routinely drink moderately, mild hangovers might just be seen as a fact of life and barely worth commenting on. Also, it may be possible to tell whether somebody drank heavily in their lifetime by examining their remains. So when we're studying burial sites or archaeological areas, but we can't tell whether they experienced a hangover from that, or if they did, what they thought about that.

• 9:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  Sometimes it's also not totally clear whether a historical source is talking about hangovers or intoxication. For example, seemingly every article on historical hangover cures includes a reference to Pliny the Elder, who lived in the first century CE, and his recommendation of the eggs of an owlet as a hangover cure. But this remedy is in a section of his Natural History covering intoxication. It doesn't seem like he's recommending this for hangovers, but for the state of being inebriated. But this is also a work that's being translated into English almost 2,000 years after it was written. I saw those owlet eggs so many times while working on this episode.

• 9:58Tracy V. Wilson?

  Some of the language around hangovers is also really recent, especially compared to how long hangovers have probably been around. You can't just go look for the word hangover in historical texts in English, because that word was not used in writing at all until 1894. And at that point, it had a more general meaning of just an aftereffect. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first known written use of the word hangover in English to mean the symptoms that can follow alcohol consumption was in 1904. And that use was by Gideon Words, which was a pseudonym for humorist Charles Wayland Town.

• 10:41Tracy V. Wilson?

  It was in The Foolish Dictionary, an exhausting work of reference to uncertain English words, their origin, meaning legitimate and illegitimate use, confused by a few pictures. One of the definitions in this humorous dictionary was for the word "brain." "The top-floor apartment in the human block, known as the cranium, and kept by the Sarah sisters, Sarah Brum and Sarah Bellum, assisted by Medulla Oblongata. All three are nervous, but are always confined to their cells. The brain is done in gray and white and furnished with light and heat, hot or cold water, if desired, with regular connections to the outside world by way of the spinal circuit,

• 11:23Tracy V. Wilson?

  usually occupied by the intellect brothers, thoughts and ideas and intelligence office, but sometimes sublet to jag, hangover and company." This passage is also one of the examples in the Oxford English Dictionary's entry on the word "jag," meaning "a drinking bout, the state of being drunk, or as much liquor as a man could carry." Language around hangovers has also evolved outside of English as well. Like, when I was in French class in the 1990s, I learned that to say "I have a hangover," you'd say "j'ai mal au cheveu," which means basically "my hair hurts." But according to an article I read in Bon Appetit while working on this episode,

• 12:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  nobody says that anymore. And now people call a hangover "une gueule de bois," which, taken literally, would be "wooden mouth." I thought about including the word for hangover in a bunch of different languages as part of this episode, but after the whole "mal au cheveu" incident, I realized I didn't really know whether any of this slang is still being used. Also, we would need to figure out how to pronounce it all. We have rerecorded my bad French pronunciation a number of times at this point, and Casey has cut them all out for us. We will talk about some references to hangovers in literature and art after we pause for a sponsor break.

• 12:50Tracy V. Wilson?

  Deanna Flores, flag football star, trailblazer, broadcaster and entrepreneur, knows what pressure feels like. She knows what it takes to step up in the moment, and she knows that even the biggest achievement is never the end of the story. In the new podcast, Born to Become with Deanna Flores, she's sitting down with people from every corner of culture, including sports, business, wellness and entertainment, to find the whole person behind the public identity. Whether she's talking to an athlete on the field, a founder heading into a pitch, or a musician before a show, the conversation starts with the official bio ends. Every episode, Deanna shares her own experiences, questions and even doubts. Her guests learn from her, she learns from them, and you might pick up something along

• 13:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  the way. No lectures, no know-it-all host, just real people being real. Come curious and leave with something you can use. Listen to Born to Become with Deanna Flores out now on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Created in partnership with Geico.

• 13:52Tracy V. Wilson?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best

• 14:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  show up for each other? Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 14:47Speaker 03

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 15:15Speaker 04

  This is Shirley Strawberry from the Steve Harvey Morning Show. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it starts with a great deal on an all-wheel-drive Camry, Corolla Cross, or a Corolla Sedan with the latest features and tech. Or test drive a spacious Grand Highlander or adventure-ready RAV4. And with so many hybrid models available, you can enjoy longer trips without all the stops. While Toyota's legendary resale value means you could get more at trade-in, get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for deals and details. Toyota, let's go places.

• 16:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  Earlier, we mentioned that some of the historical writing about hangovers can be tricky because it might not really be about hangovers. It might be more about drunkenness. The same is true of depictions in artwork. It's extremely easy to find artwork depicting alcohol and alcohol consumption. It can be trickier, though, to know for sure if a piece of art is supposed to depict a hangover. For example, there is Dutch painter Jan Steen's 1625, The Effects of Intemperance. And this depicts a group of people, probably a family, sitting on some stairs. One seems to be offering a glass of wine to a parrot sitting on a little perch.

• 16:45Tracy V. Wilson?

  Three children in the background are feeding a meat pie to a kitten, and there are other children looking on. And one woman, presumably the children's mother, is sitting on the top step. She's in an iridescent pink and green skirt and a pink bed jacket with fur around the hem and cuffs, with her left arm resting on her bent knees and her head resting in the crook of her elbow. She has what looks like a hand-rolled cigarette between the first two fingers of her right hand, which is dangling over her other knee. She could be inebriated, or she could be too hungover to put a stop to the mayhem going on around her. The social and moral impacts of drinking are a common theme in Jan Steen's artwork,

• 17:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  and the same is also true in some of the other works that might depict a hangover. Another example is an 1872 woodblock print by Shosai Ikke. This work is called "Learn a Lesson from Drinking Sake." The first panel shows somebody having a meal along with some sake. He seems to be enjoying himself, but as he continues to drink, his situation looks progressively less fun and more chaotic, and in the final frame, he is on a futon, partly covered by a blanket, vomiting while three almost ghostly figures beat him with sticks. That feels like a hangover to me, but he possibly could still just be intoxicated.

• 18:11Tracy V. Wilson?

  And then also, some of this reminds me of some of William Hogarth's works, like a rake's progress, which we have talked about on the show before. Fortunately, sometimes the title of the work can help clear things up. One example is French painter Henri Toulouse-Retrexe's The Hangover: Suzanne Valladon, which he painted in the late 1880s. Valladon was a former circus performer who had been in a relationship with Toulouse-Retrexe for about two years, and the painting shows Valladon in profile, sitting with her elbows on a table and her head resting on her left hand. There's a half-empty wine bottle and a mostly empty glass on the table, and she's looking into the distance with a scowl as though she might have a headache.

• 18:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  This painting has a lot of green and blue color and very sketchy brushwork that makes it all look kind of hazy. This has some similarities to "The Day After" by Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, which was painted from 1894 to 1895. This time, the subject is a woman lying on her back on a bed, her left arm hanging off of it, and her hair spilling off the pillow toward the floor. She looks like she's probably asleep, and there is a table in one corner that has two glasses and two bottles on it. This painting is mostly in shades of white and brown, and it just makes everything feel kind of subdued. In 1883, another Norwegian painter, Christian Kroge,

• 19:41Tracy V. Wilson?

  created a self-portrait called "The Next Day." The artist is looking out from the canvas, his hands on both sides of his head as though he's trying to hold in a headache. His nose is red, and everything else in the painting is in shades of tan and gray, and it looks kind of washed out and sickly. And the last pieces of visual art we're talking about are not of human beings. An Oktoberfest postcard by German illustrator Arthur Thiel, who lived from 1860 to 1936, says "Greetings from Oktoberfest" in German, and then at the bottom, "Oh, this cat," also in German. A German word for hangover is "Kater," or tomcat, and this cat looks miserable.

• 20:25Tracy V. Wilson?

  He's wearing a red kerchief with white polka dots knotted around his neck, almost like a little sailor's kerchief, but then he also has a white bandage tied around his head below his ears. One of his eyes is completely closed, and the other is only a little bit open and looks very red around the edges. Another German artwork is a 1913 painting by Lovis Koren called "Katerfrühstück," or "Hangover Breakfast," depicting a breakfast plate with a fish on it that's probably pickled herring, which is part of what the German "hangover breakfast" typically includes.

• 21:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  People have also been writing about hangovers for centuries before the word was coined. There is an entire book by Jonathan Shears called The Hangover: A Literary and Cultural History, which starts with the early modern period and explores hangovers as both a sociocultural and a psychological phenomenon. That book came out from Liverpool University Press in 2020. Rather than trying to give an overview of writing about hangovers throughout history, we're going to have just a couple of illustrative examples. There are a lot of accounts of people's own experiences with hangovers in their letters and their diaries, like past podcast subject Samuel Peeps.

• 21:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  His diary mentions a lot of them without the word hangover, which didn't exist yet, like his entry from September 22, 1660 ends, quote, "Today, not well of my last night's drinking yet. On April 3, 1661, his head was, quote, "aching all day from last night's debauch." His diary entry for April 24, 1661 begins, quote, "Waked in the morning with my head in a sad taking through the last night's drink, which I am very sorry for. So rose and went out with Mr. Creed to drink our morning draught, which he did give me in chocolate to settle my stomach."

• 22:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  As a segue into a discussion of hangover cures, here's something from The Contented Cuckold or Woman's Advocate by Reuben Bourne, written in 1692. According to a 19th century entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, Bourne was a, quote, "dramatist, belonged to the Middle Temple, and left behind him a solitary and feeble comedy which has never been acted." So this snippet is a conversation between the characters of Sparkish and Friendly, and we will be doing a dramatic reading for you today. I am going to be Sparkish and then Tracy will be Friendly, so it opens. 'Tis the wine I drank last night lies in my head. I wonder how you rub through with

• 23:13Tracy V. Wilson?

  it so well as you do. I am as squeamish as a new married woman that's breeding her first child. When she is in one of her breeding fits, she resolves never to have any more children, and I, in one of my sick qualms, never to drink any more wine. But you see how quickly we break our resolutions. The first kind proffer and the first good company make us run the hazard of a disorder, though we have experienced the sad effects before. Bear up, man. Ne'er give way and part good company for the headache or disaffected stomach. 'Tis so childish. I am ashamed to hear thee name it. One bottle sets thee right again and makes thee sound as a rock. There's no medicine I know like it. 'Tis beyond all the pills in the world.

• 23:59Tracy V. Wilson?

  We're gonna talk some more about hangover cures after we first pause for a sponsor break.

• 24:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  Deanna Flores, flag football star, trailblazer, broadcaster, and entrepreneur, knows what pressure feels like. She knows what it takes to step up in the moment, and she knows that even the biggest achievement is never the end of the story. In the new podcast, Born to Become with Deanna Flores, she's sitting down with people from every corner of culture, including sports, business, wellness, and entertainment, to find the whole person behind the public identity. Whether she's talking to an athlete on the field, a founder heading into a pitch, or a musician before a show, the conversation starts with the official bio ends. Every episode, Deanna shares her own experiences, questions, and even doubts. Her guests learn from her, she learns from them, and you might pick up something along the way. No lectures,

• 24:51Tracy V. Wilson?

  no know-it-all host, just real people being real. Come curious and leave with something you can use. Listen to Born to Become with Deanna Flores out now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Created in partnership with Geico.

• 25:09Tracy V. Wilson?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each other?

• 25:54Tracy V. Wilson?

  Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 26:04Speaker 05

  Cash Flow Crunch, OnDeck's small business line of credit, gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 26:34Speaker 06

  Hey, it's Lunchbox from the Bobby Bones Show. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability, and it starts with a great deal on an all-wheel-drive Camry, Corolla Cross, or a Corolla Sedan with the latest features in tech. Or test drive a spacious Grand Highlander or an adventure-ready RAV4. And with so many hybrid models available, you can enjoy longer trips without all the stops. While Toyota's legendary resale value means you could get more at trade-in, get a deal today and great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for deals and details. Toyota, let's go places.

• 27:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  Similarly to how I thought we would talk about how to say hangover in a bunch of different languages, I thought this episode was going to include hangover cures throughout history and all around the world. But the more I looked at all the hangover cures, the more it started to just seem like every conceivable thing has been proposed as a hangover cure at some point. And it just started to feel like a very bizarre grocery list. So we're going to focus on a few specifics, starting with what Friendly was recommending to Sparkish back before the break, which is the hair of the dog. That's a shortening of the hair of the dog that bit you, meaning another drink. And some people take it to

• 28:01Tracy V. Wilson?

  mean specifically another drink of what you were drinking the night before. The origin of this phrase is a little bit vague. Some sources that Tracy used in this episode say that it started in England, and others say Scotland, and still others say it's Scandinavia. Regardless, the idea is that it supposedly comes from folk medicine involving actual dog bites. If someone was bitten by a dog, their wound would heal, or maybe they would not get rabies if they got a hair from the dog that bit them and either put the hair right there in the wound, or burned the hair and then put its ashes on the wound. That will not cure a dog bite. That will absolutely not prevent rabies. Rabies

• 28:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  is fatal once symptoms develop, and a bite from a potentially rabid animal requires prompt medical treatment. So don't use these silly methods. Go to a doctor. We did a whole episode on this in May of 2022. Yeah, every single time there's some kind of incident involving a rabid animal, it feels like the comments on the social media are full of people who do not understand the seriousness of rabies. Uh, some sources, though, point to something a lot older, not necessarily as the origin of this, but as an early example, and that is supposedly an ancient Greek playwright. In some sources, it's Antiphones, who lived in the 4th century BCE, and other sources

• 29:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  say it's the grammarian Athenius, who lived in the 3rd century CE and described it to Aristophanes, who lived in the 5th century BCE. Regardless of what Greek person is the supposed origin, the lines are the same, which is, quote, "Take the hair, it is well written, of the dog by which you're bitten; work off one wine by his brother and one labor by another." That does not pass the sniff test for me. We're gonna say why? No, it's because this source may be apocryphal. It's found in an 1894 edition of the Reverend Ebenezer Cobham Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, as part of his definition of hair of the dog that bit you.

• 30:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  Brewer writes, quote, "In Scotland, it is a popular belief that a few hairs of the dog that bit you, applied to the wound, will prevent evil consequences. Applied to drinks, it means, if overnight you have indulged too freely, take a glass of the same wine next morning to soothe the nerves. If this dog do you bite, soon as out of your bed, take a hair of the tail in the morning." Brewer also included this dog bite cure into the section on superstitions in his Reader's Handbook of Illusions, References, Plots, and Stories with two appendices. And it appears in a ton of 19th and early 20th century books on homeopathy.

• 30:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  Otherwise, these four lines mostly seem to show up in articles about hangovers. It makes sense that this, uh, supposed Greek poem would be used as an example in homeopathy books, since the idea of like cures like is central to homeopathy, which was at its peak of popularity in the 19th century. Uh, also say that there's the sort of appeal to ancient wisdom in there. Beyond that, though, in 1967, folklorist Frank M. Paulson published a paper in the Journal of American Folklore, in which he talked about first encountering the hair of the dog, folk belief about dog bites.

• 31:40Tracy V. Wilson?

  During a seminar on Scandinavian folklore, after the discussion turned to sympathetic magic, here's how Sir James George Fraser framed the idea of sympathetic magic in The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion. Quote, "If we analyze the principles of thought on which magic is based, they will probably be found to resolve themselves into two. First, that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause. And second, that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed. The former principle may be called the law of similarity. The latter, the law of contact or contagion."

• 32:25Tracy V. Wilson?

  So sympathetic magic is its own fascinating topic. And I've had the 17th century belief in weapon salve, or powder of sympathy, on my shortlist for a while. That was a salve or a powder that would be applied to a weapon that had harmed somebody in order to cure the wound that the weapon had made. I am not sure that can actually support a whole episode. This may be it for the discussion of weapon salve on our show. But I am so fascinated by this connection of the idea of hair of the dog as a hangover cure to both homeopathy and sympathetic magic. The term hair of the dog as a hangover cure

• 33:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  has been around in English, at least since 1546, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Which can bring us back to Frank M. Paulson's paper on hangover cures. Paulson's interest in hangover cures was piqued by the hair of the dog conversation that we mentioned a moment ago, followed by a random thing he heard a bartender say about a year later, which was that another patron at the bar must have a hangover because he was ordering a warm beer. So Paulson started talking to people and collecting their hangover cures, mostly in Detroit and Montreal, but in other places as well. He talked to 149 total informants and included more than 250 cures in his book,

• 33:50Tracy V. Wilson?

  10 of them being some variant on hair of the dog. That was in addition to 40 cures involving liquor and beer, 31 involving mixed drinks, and 11 involving food combined with liquor, but not framed as hair of the dog. I have read a lot of papers in my life from an assortment of fields. I'm usually reading multiple papers every week while I work on this show. And I just want to take a minute to say, this was one of the most delightful papers I have ever read in an academic journal. After relaying this whole story about the bartender and the warm beer and the bartender apparently just keeping warm beer on hand for the hangover patrons.

• 34:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  Paulson says, quote, "By the time my wife and I left an hour later, I had collected no less than eight different hangover cures, all as I to discover a part of that gigantic vortex of folklore, almost fanatically believed by the general drinking public." And so, the patrician of this collection. The hangover cures that he lists out are presented as they were told to him by bartenders, bussers, and bar patrons from a range of occupations, like if they were willing to tell him what they did for a living, at least. So it just reads like people talking to him, like, quote, "Rare beef, as rare as you can get it, is the only thing that really helps. It works every time."

• 35:17Tracy V. Wilson?

  Or, quote, "I'm 63 years old come Sunday, and I've had my share of hangovers, but if you want to know the truth, there's no cure except time. Of course, you have to do what you can, and the best thing is to eat raw cabbage. That does help." Or, quote, "I've never had a hangover, but if I had one, I guess I'd drink a glass of tomato juice." Isn't that what people do? In addition to all the various cures involving alcohol, this paper also has sections listing out foods, juices, milk and ice cream, sex, patent medicine, preventatives and avoidance, and miscellaneous. Patent medicine, in this case, is not what we might think of as patent medicines with

• 36:01Tracy V. Wilson?

  old timey hucksters selling a bottle of mostly alcohol out of a wagon. Those cures include baking soda in water, various amounts of aspirin, and a couple of people who said that they knew there was a pill to cure hangovers, but that that pill is being kept a secret. Nobody said the words Big Pharma, but that was the vibe that like, the pharmaceutical companies or the doctors know, but they're not telling us. Both within and beyond this paper, there are some running themes and a lot of the things that people have proposed as hangover cures throughout history, especially in what we think of as like the West.

• 36:41Tracy V. Wilson?

  Raw eggs come up a lot and hot sauce and things that are salty or fried. One thing that combines a lot of that is a prairie oyster, which contains a raw egg or egg yolk, Worcestershire sauce, hot sauce, and salt or pepper. And then you drink that like a shot. No, thank you. No, I don't want it either. The origins of the prairie oyster aren't well documented, but it might have gotten its start intentionally as a hangover cure. A number of other foods and beverages have origin stories focused on hangovers as well. One of them we talked about in our third installment on eponymous foods, Eggs Benedict,

• 37:22Tracy V. Wilson?

  named for Lemuel Benedict, who allegedly asked for poached eggs in a pitcher of hollandaise sauce after a night of overindulgence in 1894. The Italian spirit Fernet was also originally a hangover cure and a more general cure-all. Bernardino Branca developed this in 1895. And at the time, in addition to ingredients like chamomile, peppermint, cardamom, and myrrh, it included grape-infused spirits and opiates. It is still around today, minus the opiates, as a type of Amaro. Another, of course, is the Bloody Mary, which combines the hair of the dog with

• 38:03Tracy V. Wilson?

  multiple other frequently proposed hangover cures, including tomato juice, hot sauce, and Worcestershire sauce. This drink was reportedly the invention of Fernand Pethio, bartender at Harry's Bar in Paris in 1921. Harry's Bar was owned by Harry McElhoney, who published Harry's ABC of Cocktails that same year. A later edition of this cocktail book calls it a Red Mary, writing, quote, "In shaker, ice, three dashes of lemon juice, one dash of Worcestershire sauce, salt, cayenne pepper, one jigger of vodka, fill with tomato juice, shake well and strain in a large tumbler." Yeah, I could not find the original 1921, but I thought, you know, who probably

• 38:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  has this book, Harry's ABC of Cocktails, is Holly. So the one Holly sent me was called something like the revised edition or new edition or something like that. There are multiple contradictory stories about who Mary is supposed to be in the drink Bloody Mary. One, of course, is Mary Tudor, Queen of England and Ireland, who was known as Bloody Mary. Another is just some other patron at the bar who was muttering under their breath about somebody named Mary. The story that I heard in college was that it was Ernest Hemingway and that it was about his wife, Mary, because he was trying to find a way that he could drink without her smelling it on his breath. They did not meet until

• 39:31Tracy V. Wilson?

  a couple of decades after the Bloody Mary was invented, though. The entire meal of brunch also has some ties to hangovers. One of the first written uses of the word brunch was in Brunch, a plea by Guy Berenger in 1895. He doesn't specifically mention hangovers. Again, that word wasn't really coined yet, but he frames brunch as a good meal for after a night of drinking. He writes of it as a Sunday meal served around noon, saying, quote, "You are therefore able to prolong your Saturday nights heedless of that moral last train, the fear of the next morning's reaction. It leaves the station

• 40:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  with your usual seat vacant and many others unoccupied." Brunch, a plea, also ends, quote, "P.S. Beer and whiskey are admitted as substitutes for tea and coffee." So do any of these cures or any of the innumerable other cures proposed throughout recorded history actually work for curing hangovers? Probably not. A lot of articles say that the hair of the dog specifically could potentially lead toward alcohol misuse. A December 2021 study was published in the journal Addiction that evaluated 21 placebo-controlled,

• 40:51Tracy V. Wilson?

  randomized trials of purported hangover cures. These cures included curcumin extracted from turmeric, probiotics, supplements containing amino acids like L-cysteine, clovenol extracted from clove buds, red ginseng, Korean pear juice, prickly pear, and artichoke. Some of these cures did show some statistically significant improvement in people's symptoms, but all of the evidence was very low quality. Eight of the studies included only male participants. So it's like even in the ones that did show some improvement, the study itself wasn't robust enough to actually make that conclusion. The press release for this study ran with the headline,

• 41:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  quote, "No convincing scientific evidence that hangover cures work," according to new research. An earlier paper in the British Medical Journal in 2005 came to similar conclusions and also analyzed some of the studies that had already been published by that point. Both of these papers commented on the fact that there's just not a lot of high-quality research into this area. Obviously, that's not evaluating all of the hangover cures in the world, but it's enough research saying, "There's not a lot of evidence," to broadly say, "Probably not." Yeah. Also, people aren't reporting their hangovers, and everybody's body is different and reacts to different things.

• 42:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  So it's, you can't go off of anything except trying to get people drunk, which we discussed earlier, has problems ethically. There is general agreement, though, that the best treatment for a hangover is to avoid getting one in the first place by either not drinking alcohol or drinking in moderation, staying hydrated, and possibly taking an over-the-counter pain reliever and a multivitamin before bed, but not one containing acetaminophen, which, like alcohol, is processed in the liver. None of this is medical advice, by the way. Yeah, we're not doctors. That's just what came up repeatedly in a lot of articles as I was working on this episode, which feels to me like some stuff about hangovers.

• 43:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  Do you have listener mail? I do. Our listener mail is from Yuan. The email says, Holly and Tracy, "Saratoga, Winnebago." The subject sent me a jolt. Could this be related to the town of Winnebago, Nevada? Could it? "On a long drive to winter vacation in tri-state Bear Lake, Utah in 2018, I chose Winnebago for an overnight stay largely because of a flyer about the 150th anniversary of Transcontinental Railroad from San Jose's Chinese Historical and Cultural Project, in which my daughter joined its youth docent program. Winnebago was a site of celebration." The flyer noted that Dr. Sun Yat-sen made a stop

• 43:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  in its then-Chinatown to raise funds for his eminent resolution. "Our stop turned out to be mainly, we were here. We arrived late in the afternoon. I had hoped to find nearby historical marks in the morning before heading back on the road, but Google was of little help. Chinatown is long gone, and there is hardly a roadway landmark. The only object of interest I found in the brief driving around was the Ten Commandments cast on stone in front of a courthouse. So much for separation of church and state." All these years, Winnebago has remained a mere waypoint on that memorable trip and a talking point when my teen daughter wants to complain to her friends about how her dad chose a waypoint. Until your two-parter, that is. Even though you did not explicitly mention the town,

• 44:33Tracy V. Wilson?

  your talk brings the name and the territory to life. And yes, Google helped this time, rather Wikipedia did. But even Wikipedia couldn't answer my question about incorporation and naming of the town, given this much battle, bloodshed, and betrayal suffered by Winnebago's people. This American Life's mini-series on a road trip down the Trail of Tears doesn't specifically mention Winnebago the chief or Winnebago the town. As I have no pet to pay the pet tax, I hope you will accept pictures of Pig, the restaurant we dined at in Winnebago on the ceiling are dollar bills patrons signed, plus the courthouse. If you zoom in, you will see the inscription on the stone. From the South, you must have seen lots of these, but Winnebago being the only incorporated

• 45:17Tracy V. Wilson?

  town in Humboldt County and all of that. I cannot say that I've visited many courthouses in California where I live either. So the novelty might just be my ignorance. Belated happy Thanksgiving, you on. So, thank you for this email. You want is a regular correspondent with us. We've gotten lots of emails and I wanted to read this one for a couple of reasons. One, yes, the town of Winnebago, Nevada, probably named after Sarah Winnebago's father, Winnebago. But it also gives us a chance to kind of talk about Sarah Winnebago's experiences with Chinese immigrants to the United States,

• 45:59Tracy V. Wilson?

  which is also related to this email. So there was a big influx of Chinese immigrants into the US, starting with the gold rush, which was when she was a child. And then also a major part of the labor force in the transcontinental railroad, which came up in the email. And at various points in her work, Sarah Winnebago talked and spoke about Chinese people and she would kind of frame Chinese immigrants as foreigners who were being welcomed into the United States, which was in comparison to her own people who were native to North America and were being oppressed. This was sort of a tool of rhetoric. It doesn't reflect the realities of Chinese immigrants' treatment by or in the United States, which we talked

• 46:44Tracy V. Wilson?

  about in so many previous episodes of the show. And this is something that she would have been aware of, especially because there were times that Chinese people faced some violence in the areas near where she lived. So it was like she had this thing in her rhetoric that was about her perceptions of her people versus Chinese people. It doesn't quite align with like the reality, but at the same time, she also would do things like try to de-escalate conflicts between indigenous communities and Chinese communities when they were in some kind of dispute with one another. The town of Winnemucca, Britannica says that railroad officials renamed what had been

• 47:23Tracy V. Wilson?

  French Ford after Winnemucca in 1868, but I found other references to possibly other people being the source of naming the town for Winnemucca. There are lots of places in the United States that are named with indigenous words or for indigenous peoples, and sometimes it's because somebody was a respected leader that the people who were, like the, the white communities that were settling the area had a positive relationship with. Sometimes it has like a more complicated nuance where it was like, the, like, the

• 47:59Tracy V. Wilson?

  United States was explicitly trying to remove indigenous people from life, but also saw the indigenous history of North America as like something unique that needed to be preserved and kind of celebrated. And, and so it gets a little weird. I always think of that in a similar way that I think about the way Victorian England became obsessed with a lot of other global cultures. Oh, sure. But they wanted them to be represented and preserved in a way that was palatable to them. Uh huh.

• 48:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  And I kind of liken it a little bit to that. Yeah. There's, I don't know if it's still there. I'm not sure if it's part of the permanent collection or if it is, uh, was a temporary exhibit, but at the Museum of the, the Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC, uh, there's a huge, or was a huge exhibit that was on indigenous names and imagery and advertising that is kind of on that same kind of theme of like indigenous people facing racism and oppression and genocide, but then also brands, uh, adopting indigenous imagery for their, um, their products. Um, one last little point of clarity on this is that, uh, the Trail of Tears is usually

• 49:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  used to describe the forced removal from the southeastern US to what's now Oklahoma. And so the road trip that was on This American Life, which to be clear, I have not listened to those episodes, it would not have gone as far west as Nevada. So anyway, thank you so, so much for this email and all of your other emails. UN has sent a number of emails and they're always really great. And if you would like to send us a note about this or any other podcasts, we're at [email protected]. And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you like to get your podcasts.

• 50:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 50:24Tracy V. Wilson?

  Deanna Flores is a flag football star, a trailblazer, an entrepreneur, and now host of a new podcast. In Born to Become with Deanna Flores, she's sitting down with people from every corner of culture to find the whole person behind the public identity. Every episode, you'll get to know Deanna, her guests, and even yourself a little better. No lectures, no know-it-all host, just real people being real. Listen to Born to Become with Deanna Flores, out now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Created in partnership with Geico. A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host

• 51:06Tracy V. Wilson?

  Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 51:31Speaker 04

  $47. All right, we're gonna need a plan here.

• 51:36Speaker 00

  Just start simple with Bank of America Advantage Safe Balance Banking. No overdraft item fees, no monthly maintenance fee if you're under 25. Oh, that's actually really simple. Safe Balance Banking, one less thing to figure out. Learn more at B of A dot com slash simple banking. Terms and conditions apply. Bank of America and a member FDIC.

• 51:57Speaker 02

  This is Stugatz from Stugatz and Company Live. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it all starts with a great deal on an all-wheel-drive Camry, Corolla Cross, or a Corolla Sedan with the latest features N-Tech, or Test Drive, a spacious Grand Highlander, or Adventure Ready RAV4. And with so many hybrid models available, you can enjoy longer trips without all the stops. While Toyota's legendary resale value means you can get more at trade-in. Get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for deals and details. Toyota, let's go places.

• 52:35Speaker 03

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Soltic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 53:05Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.