Picture the scene: a disheveled man stumbles through the Forum, his wine-stained toga bundled haphazardly around his torso. At his feet, a smattering of empty amphorae lie strewn across the floor, their contents greedily imbibed by the convivium’s attendees. Saturnalia has been wild this year, but the December festivities are drawing to a close and it’s time to go and lie down with a cabbage on your head.
Fast-forward a couple of millennia and we’re still partying our way through the darkness of mid-winter, though our green hangover remedies now tend to come in smoothie form. Personally, I’ve never had much relief from blended kale and ginger, so this year I’m going old-school and trying out some of the ancient world’s top cures for alcoholic remorse.
The hair of the dog?
For all the achievements of modern science, it’s somewhat surprising that we still don’t really understand why drinking too much gives us a hangover. And if you can’t figure out what causes something, then you’re going to have a pretty difficult time curing it.
Having said that, we have at least made some progress since the ancient Greeks and Romans, who attributed the after-effects of a night on the sauce to imbalanced humors or an excess of blood. Over the past decade and a half, an international team of scientists collectively known as the Alcohol Hangover Research Group has dedicated itself to demystifying the dreaded katzenjammer, shedding some much-needed light on the physiological mechanisms involved.
Among the group’s collaborators is Dr Andrew Scholey from Swinburne University. Speaking to IFLScience, the Adjunct Professor of Human Psychopharmacology explains that “a hangover is defined as a cluster of negative health effects which occur as blood alcohol returns to zero. So it’s usually when people are hungover that you know they’ve cleared the alcohol out of their body.”
The materials and methods section of my first experiment lists mulled wine as the principal ingredient, with instructions to drink like a royal guest in the imperial hospitality box at the Colosseum.
Paradoxically, then, it seems we start hanging once our systems are completely free of booze, which is around the time you might think we’d start feeling back to normal. Logic therefore tells us that if you just keep on drinking, your hangover should disappear.
According to Scholey, though, this “hair of the dog” approach has been studied, and it turns out that “all that happens is, you delay the pain for a little longer.” In other words, simply drinking more is not an effective hangover cure, which means I can cross that one off my list before I even begin my experiments.
Bottoms up
For this investigation, I have tried to replicate the effects of ancient alcohol as much as possible. The Romans, for instance, typically drank mead or wine diluted with water and flavored with spices like pepper and cinnamon. The materials and methods section of my first experiment therefore lists mulled wine as the principal ingredient, with instructions to drink like a royal guest in the imperial hospitality box at the Colosseum.
I even wore a makeshift toga that I fashioned from a bedsheet.
Like any well-prepared Greco-Roman boozehound, I made sure to place a cabbage on my pillow before passing out (much to the dismay of my 21st-century wife).
Now, about that cabbage. Supposedly, both the Greeks and the Romans believed that the cabbage and the vine were natural enemies, and therefore enlisted the leafy vegetable’s help when suffering from the effects of the previous evening’s revelry. It’s hard to pinpoint the origin of this idea and it seems that techniques for operating a cabbage were varied, with some ingesting the crop raw or steamed while others applied it topically by strapping it to their head.
As it happens, cabbage is now known to contain high levels of vitamins C and K, while tests have indicated that it may even help to protect the liver and kidneys from toxins. Like any well-prepared Greco-Roman boozehound, I therefore made sure to place a cabbage on my pillow before passing out (much to the dismay of my 21st-century wife).
Sadly, however, morning brought with it a stinking headache that refused to part with me even after my steamed cabbage breakfast. Shifting this beast of a hangover was clearly going to require something a little stronger, so I heeded the advice of a 2,000-year-old Egyptian scroll known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, which recommends wearing a garland of Alexandrian laurel around one’s neck.
Native to Asia and East Africa, the shrub isn’t too easy to come by here in London, although I did manage to source a young plant from a tree nursery before starting my experiment. Because the leaves on this immature specimen were still small, I decided to simply sit with the entire plant on my lap for a few hours while I wallowed in misery. Sadly, however, this did nothing to assuage my pain or self-loathing.
Back to the bottle
Unfortunately, there are very few surviving written sources documenting ancient hangover cures, so it’s hard to know exactly what kinds of antidotes were deployed in times gone by. One Babylonian text, however, appears to list a rescue remedy containing licorice and oleander, among other ingredients. Given that the latter is highly poisonous, however, I decided that even the most vicious hangover is probably preferable to sampling this particular concoction, which therefore didn’t make it into my experiment.
The legendary Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, meanwhile, is said to have sworn by raw owl eggs and fried canaries. Neither of these remedies appear in his famous Historia Naturalis, however, so I gave myself permission to skip these options too.
The only other ancient antidote for which there is physical evidence is amethyst, which actually comes from the Greek word amethystos, meaning “not drunk”. Archaeologists have even found ancient rings made from the quartz-like crystal, which are believed to have been worn in order to protect people from hangovers and other unwanted side effects of drinking too much.
The next day was absolutely horrendous, and my mood certainly wasn’t helped by the site of all that stupid amethyst sitting uselessly around my house like a bunch of sparkly purple jerks.
Unsurprisingly, there’s zero science to back this up, although the stone is still sold as a hangover cure to overly credulous shoppers. Rather than waste my own money, I borrowed some amethyst crystals from my mum and braced myself for a second bender (in the name of science) a few days after my first hangover had subsided.
Unable to stomach any more mulled wine, however, I chose Scotch as my poison this time around. Unfortunately for me, studies have shown that whisky tends to produce a worse hangover than other spirits like vodka, possibly because it is aged in oak barrels that leach a variety of compounds known as congeners, many of which are believed to contribute to hangover severity.
Sure enough, the next day was absolutely horrendous, and my mood certainly wasn’t helped by the site of all that stupid amethyst sitting uselessly around my house like a bunch of sparkly purple jerks. I guess those congeners got me (and, err, the alcohol probably didn’t help either).
A modern solution?
If there’s one thing those hungover Roman cabbage huggers – and my experiments – have taught us, it’s that you shouldn’t believe the hype surrounding purported cures for excess. Yet that doesn’t stop us modernites from attempting to banish our boozy blues with all manner of unscientific remedies.
In collaboration with other researchers from the Alcohol Hangover Research Group, Scholey recently co-authored a study examining 82 of the top products on Amazon claiming to alleviate hangovers. Shockingly, he says that “there was absolutely zero empirical evidence for any of them,” which just goes to show that today’s drinkers are no less gullible than those ancient inebriates.
While scientists are unlikely to develop a reliable remedy until they fully understand what causes hangovers, hope may be on the horizon, as a couple of promising avenues have already been identified. For instance, Scholey explains that “there are toxic metabolites which are generated during alcohol elimination,” which are likely to contribute significantly to the development of uncomfortable symptoms as we sober up.
The most interesting of these is acetaldehyde, which is produced as the body processes ethanol and is considerably more toxic than alcohol itself. “With a toxin like that, one thing that happens is you get a cytokine response, which is a kind of inflammatory response that usually occurs when we encounter a virus or other foreign bodies,” says Scholey.
“And you know, there is emerging evidence that in the phase after alcohol elimination, when people are suffering from a hangover, the level of these inflammatory markers increases.” It therefore seems plausible that treatments targeting inflammation may have a role to play in alleviating hangovers, although we are still waiting for large-scale clinical trials to confirm whether or not this really is the case.
For what it’s worth, studies have also shown that drinking water doesn’t ease a hangover, although it does rectify the dehydration that typically accompanies a morning-after headache.
For now, then, the age-old search for a cure goes on, although as Scholey points out, “there are all sorts of ethical issues about whether a hangover treatment is desirable anyway.” After all, while such a remedy may be developed with the intention of reducing the harms associated with alcohol, the reality is that “people might use a product like that in order to drink more.”
And Zeus knows we do more than enough of that as it is.
The content of this article is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice or treatment. Always seek the advice of qualified health providers.
This article first appeared in Issue 29 December 2024 of our digital magazine CURIOUS. Subscribe and never miss an issue.