1860s Hangover Cures: Hair of the Dog, Switchel, Raw Eggs and Clean Cuts

The Hair, the Dog, and Three Hundred Years of Bad Advice

Not long ago Barnaby, my black bear, got into the slop bucket behind the still-house. Next morning he lay in the ferns groaning, four hundred pounds of regret. I have seen the same face on a Concord legislator the morning after Election Day. It put me in mind of the cures a Suncook Valley man reaches for after a frolic. I am a tooth-puller, a blacksmith and an alchemist by turns, so I set out to test every cure I would allow upon willing volunteers of this valley. Willing is a strong word. They were willing the night before, and I hold a man to what he says the night before.

Begin with the phrase. Hair of the dog was once a real cure for a real dog bite. If a cur bit you, the old wives said to pluck a hair from that same cur and bind it on the wound, since like cures like. Picture the second half of that treatment: a man with a bleeding calf chasing the dog that bit him for a souvenir. He usually got bitten a second time, and ended with two wounds and a hair.

The drinking sense is old as well. John Heywood printed it among his English proverbs in 1546: a fellow begging a hair of the dog that bit him last night. So for over three hundred years Englishmen and Yankees have woken in the hay and decided that the cure for a poison is more of the same poison. The Romans were no wiser. Pliny the Elder, who died walking toward a volcano for a better look, wrote that raw owl's eggs would cure drunkenness. I once tried to rob an owl, in 1849, up a hemlock behind the Berry farm, on a dare and three sheets to the wind. The owl took a piece of my scalp the size of a silver half-dime, and I never got the egg.

Our New England grandfathers called the morning dram an antifogmatic, taken to keep off the fog and the damp. In New Hampshire that licenses a man to drink before breakfast every day of the year but four, and on those four he drinks to celebrate the weather.

What the Body Owes

Speaking as a man of medicine, the kind who pulls teeth with his boot braced on the patient's chest: a morning dram cures nothing. It puts off the bill. Part of your misery is the body settling its accounts as the spirit leaves your blood. Pour more in and you have taken out a second note at a worse rate. Spirit also makes a man pass water like a mill race in April, which is why he wakes dry as a church sermon with a skull full of hornets. Water helps. Rest helps. Plain food helps. Time helps most, and time cannot be bottled. I have tried.

Trials at Fort Wilkins

The first trial was the sensible one: switchel, the haymaker's punch. You want spring water, a good glug of cider vinegar, grated ginger root, and molasses or maple sugar to make it go down. Amos Tuttle, cooper, had drunk enough at the Pittsfield muster to float a gundalow and came to me green as a frog's belly. I gave him a quart of cold switchel, a slab of brown bread and a pile of straw in the shade. By three o'clock he was cursing my name in complete sentences, which in Amos is the picture of health. It works about as well as water, sugar and a nap can work, which is to say honestly.

The second was the Concord tavern cure: a raw egg in a glass with vinegar, black pepper and a dash of the Worcestershire sauce Lea and Perrins have shipped from England since about 1837, the yolk swallowed whole. Amos took it down like a frog going down a well. For a moment there was peace in the valley. Then the egg came back up whole, like a hen laying in reverse, and landed on my boot still round and still warm. Barnaby ate it off the boot. My verdict is that it is nourishing for bears.

The third was the cruel one, the old lumberman's cold plunge. In October I marched the Drake boys, Elias and Josiah, into the mill pond above the dam on the Suncook, up to their necks, after a husking bee. Elias came out blue from the collar down and chattering so hard he chipped a molar, which I pulled at half price. It cured the hangover, for no man has ever had a hangover and pneumonia at once. Do not try it. Men have stopped their hearts in cold water, sober or drunk.

One cure I would not test is calomel, which is mercurous chloride, still given by some country doctors as a purge. Calomel is mercury. I have pulled black, loose teeth from men who took blue mass and calomel for years, and they came out like fence posts from a bog. Surgeon General William Hammond struck calomel and tartar emetic off the army supply table in 1863, and the fury of the old doctors helped get him court-martialed. Tartar emetic is antimony, a poison given to make a man vomit. When I want a man to lose his teeth, I use forceps.

One gentle remedy I allow is white willow bark, chewed or steeped. The Indians and the English herb-wives both used it, and the salicin in it eases a sore head for some folks. It is bitter, and too much upsets the stomach, so take a little and mind it.

Last came the literal hair of the dog. Ezra Pease, tanner, reasoned that if dog hair worked, bear hair must work four hundred pounds better. He crept up on Barnaby with sewing scissors. I watched from the window and did not shout, in the name of science and because Ezra owed me three dollars for a bicuspid. He got one snip. Barnaby swung a paw, Ezra flew eight feet into the leaves, and his breeches stayed on the claws. Barnaby sat on them and ate the pocket, which held a biscuit. Ezra lay there shouting that his head was clear as a bell. Of course it was. Fright is the only true hangover cure, and it comes in one size.

Mornings After at the Hearth

Half the famous scrapes in the spirit trade happened before noon. In Barnstead they tell of a runner I will call Harlan who drove a wagonload of jugs under hay into Concord the morning after his birthday frolic. He asked the man on the steps for a dipper of water. That man was the assistant assessor of Internal Revenue, and he gave Harlan the water and then a receipt for wagon, jugs, hay and horse. I myself, after testing a run of rye on my own person, once set my counterstamp punch, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., in upside down and wrong way round and struck forty coppers. The deputy took one as evidence. The magistrate held it to a mirror and said that at least the man signs his crimes.

Silas McAllister, called Hacksaw, of the Fort Wilkins foundry, keeps his father's rule that no man touches the brazing hearth the morning after a frolic. A hungover journeyman once laid the spelter on a swan-neck seam in lumps and left a pinhole. On the test run the spirit vapour crept low to the firebox and lit with a whump, and a blue sheet of flame ran into the rafters. They saved the shed, but the rafters are black still. "A shaking hand can't fill a seam," said his father, "and a man who can't hold his drink shouldn't hold a torch."

Silas's grandfather saw a barn raising in Barnstead brought low by a tinker's switchel, mixed in a bare copper kettle with no tin lining and left in the sun. Vinegar eats bare copper, and so does any sour drink, cider and switchel included, and it carries the copper into the drink. By one o'clock half the crew were heaving off the ridgepole. Never keep a sour drink standing in bare copper. The same grandfather sold a cure for a penny. The sufferer held a copper pot between his knees while the old man planished it, thousands of ringing blows. A man from Loudon took it and swore off strong drink for eleven years.

How a Hangover Is Made in the Still

What follows is history and education. Making distilled spirits to drink without a federal permit is against United States law. But half the worst mornings in this valley were made at the still. The old corn mash ran roughly a pound of cracked corn to every half-gallon of water. It was brought up hot and stirred against scorching until it thickened to a porridge. Malted barley was often added once it had cooled enough to hold a finger in, because the malt turns starch to sugar. At blood-warm the yeast went in, and the tubs sat covered in a warm room with good air moving, since fermenting mash breathes out a gas that can smother a man. When it quits bubbling, the wash is strained off the grain into the pot.

Keep the fire low and steady, for a slow run is a clean run. Check every seam, keep water and sacks close, and use no lead solder or salvaged junk metal. Then come the cuts, which are the true experiment. The foreshots carry methanol, which blinds and kills, and the old makers threw out the first good cupful or more, the careful ones more still. Next the heads, sharp as glazier's varnish, carry acetaldehyde, the very thing your liver makes from spirit and one of the devils behind your morning misery. The hearts come sweet and clean, so collect in small jars and nose each one. Last the tails go thin and oily and cloudy with water, and they smell of wet dog. Those are the fusel oils, and if you want the true hair of the dog, there it is. Copper takes the sulfur stink from the vapour, but only when it is clean. Scrub it after every run, and keep any green crust out of the spirit.

Ashes, Oak Shavings and the Blue Flame

Cletus Miller, called Rabbit, of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, sent word that his uncle swears "old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads." Wood ash leached in a hopper yields lye, and potash was once a chief export of New England. The first patent the United States granted, in 1790, went to Samuel Hopkins for a better way of making potash and pearl ash. But the volatile poison boils over in the vapour regardless, so keep the ash for the laundry. Red oak gives the spirit tannins and colour, and that is flavouring, not cleaning. It is a powdered wig on a hog.

Nor does the blue flame prove anything. Good spirit burns blue, and so does methanol, pale and nearly invisible by daylight, and the red flame saying is no reliable test for lead. The only honest test is honest cuts, made by an honest nose, in clean copper. In this valley a man with a hangover is said to be wearing the bear. Since Ezra's trial, the saying is more literal than it used to be. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.