Something old and something new this week.
I rummaged through the archives for the story below, which is adapted from one I originally wrote for The Atlantic in 2011. It’s a brief look at the history of hangover cures.
I also wanted to test out some new tools for a class in digital storytelling I’m teaching this semester in the graduate writing program at Johns Hopkins University. So I put together the short video above, using A.I. for virtually every bit of it, from images to voice. It’s a work in progress. As is A.I. As is understanding how A.I. is upending and destroying everything. As is searching for the right balance between evening cocktails and an effortless morning.
At two o’clock one morning several years ago, a 22-year-old man was carried by friends into a hospital in France. He was heavily intoxicated, and his communication skills had been reduced to the occasional growl. The man was kept overnight. The next day, he awoke with an impressively large headache that grew increasingly intolerable. Puzzled, doctors eventually discovered he was not suffering from a standard-issue hangover — he had been stabbed in the head during a roistering bar fight, and the knife tip had broken off in his brain. The fragment was surgically removed, and the man quickly recovered. Doctors later penned an account for the Emergency Medicine Journal, noting that among the episode’s teaching points was this: “Headache after intoxication can be due to unexpected causes.”
Well, sure. But for me, the main teaching point was somewhat different: if you wake up after a night out and feel as if somebody stabbed you in the head with a knife, there’s now a medically documented chance that this has actually happened. Some mornings, I find this thought quite comforting — a forgotten bar fight is both more dramatic and easier to comprehend than a woeful deficit of willpower.
Sadly, very little serious research has been undertaken into the cause and cure of hangovers. A survey a decade ago found that of some 4,700 medical papers published on alcohol intoxication, just 108 dealt with hangovers — despite another study estimating that hangovers result in $148 billion in lost economic productivity in the U.S. each year. But ingrained Puritan notions decree that drinkers should pay a price for their indulgence. As many smugly point out, a cure is already known: Don’t drink. Why so little medical research? It may have been best summed up by a newspaper headline about a study more than half a century ago: “Scientists Waste Time in Seeking Counter Agent to Human Stupidity.”
Still, the search continues — if not among doctors, then certainly among drinkers. I’ve given some thought to why, often when prone in bed and balefully considering a loose window-blind slat. My belief is that the search follows Joseph Campbell’s classic hero cycle.
Consider the arc of the standard debauch: The hero leaves home on an adventure and soon encounters a flask of magical elixir. He drinks deeply and acquires superhuman abilities, including fluency in off-color jokes and newfound skills involving a spoon and the tip of one’s nose. In time, the potion exacts its price through clever sorcery, leaving the hero stranded amid a bleak, lonely landscape. Yearning for home — the couch, the remote — like Odysseus returning to Penelope at her loom, the hero embarks on another quest: seeking a second elixir to counteract the first.
Through the centuries, travelers have uncovered a great many antidotes: wrapping one’s head in cabbage leaves (Galen the Greek); eating owl’s eyes (Pliny the Elder); engaging in manly exercise (Charles H. Baker); swallowing vast amounts of vitamins; tucking into a greasy comfort breakfast of potatoes, eggs, and bacon; and quaffing a tall Bloody Mary.
I had long believed the Bloody Mary was simply liquid comfort food — the minerally taste of tomato juice, the sweet-dry scent of celery, the sharp hello! of horseradish all triggering calming memories of childhood and helping reorient one toward home. But it turns out this concoction has some actual medical merit. It contains salt and fructose to aid rehydration, potassium and Vitamin C to correct depletions, and the ballast of tomato juice to settle the stomach. And then there’s the vodka — the famous “hair of the dog,” so named for the charmingly antique belief that one could avoid rabies by applying to a dog bite some hair from the offending cur.
In fact, the counterintuitive use of alcohol to treat a hangover does have a medical basis. The reasons are too complex to explore fully here, but it essentially involves disrupting the body’s conversion of earlier alcohol into toxins. Think of the morning bracer as the rodeo clown who distracts the bull from goring you, buying a few moments to crawl to safety before it charges again.
A Bloody Mary is a potion that can steady you and point the way home. Slowly sipping one allows time for reassessment, offering a period of grace in which the hero can reflect on his adventure, learn from the experience, emerge a better person, and prepare for the next challenge.
Except, of course, for the parts about learning, improving, and preparing.
But that’s what New Year’s resolutions are for.
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