The Morning After

Hangovers are at least as old as the technology to brew alcohol to supplement the small amount that can be found naturally in overripe fruit hanging in trees. That technology is prehistoric, but the English word “hangover” is actually fairly recent, the earliest known appearance in print being in a 1904 slang dictionary. Before then the word was “crapulence,” which I rather like better though one is likely to be misunderstood using the term today. No matter how you say it (“cruda” [rawness] in New World Spanish, “resaca” [detritus from receding surf] in Old World Spanish, “Kater” [tomcat – you figure that one out] in German, etc.), it’s an unpleasantness most of us have experienced.
 
I wasn’t precocious with my vices in my youth (which I say with more embarrassment than pride) and didn’t experience a full-blown hangover until college. (It was legal: drinking age in DC then was 18.) The primary components that night were red wine and excessive conviviality with similarly bibulous friends. Back in my own dorm room, I went to bed with the stereo still on. Sometime after 4 a.m. I awakened to an awful sensation. I leapt out of bed and hurried down the hallway to the bathroom. You know what happened there. I returned my room still nauseated. Playing on the stereo (no kidding) was Melanie’s Leftover Wine, a song that to this day I cannot hear without queasiness, though I still have the album. A couple more hours of sleep did not prevent the subsequent daylight hours from being less than my happiest. I wish I could say that was my last such experience as well as the first, but it wasn’t. Like Shakespeare “I have very poor and unhappy brains for drinking” (Othello). However, unlike Shakespeare, who purportedly died of a hangover, I eventually (late 20s) curtailed my intake accordingly.

Scene of the crime: My dorm room at GWU

 
Nonetheless, the title Hungover: the Morning After and One Man’s Quest for a Cure caught my eye on the ER Hamilton bookseller website. The Canadian author Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall relates the story of his international travels. Just in the interest of research he gets drunk almost “every night now” and tries hangover "cures" in various cities. They range from a brutal massage in Switzerland to an IV drip in the Netherlands. He also does things that are not advisable to do hungover such as driving a race car and jumping off the Stratosphere in Las Vegas. The latter unexpectedly cured a hangover: the terror and adrenaline did the job, or perhaps just distracted him from his discomfort. (He was properly harnessed of course; unharnessed couldn’t possibly work more than once.) He does come up with a formula that he says works for him though he admits it could be just a placebo effect with no validity for anyone else. It’s a weird mix of B vitamins and other ingredients including some (e.g. frankincense) that might be hard to find last minute on New Year’s Eve; it also must be taken between the last drink and going to bed. (If you really need to be alert in the morning, I wouldn’t bet on this “cure.”)

 
Oddly enough, despite alcohol being the most studied of popular intoxicants, scientists still don’t really agree on what causes hangovers. Dehydration and the build-up of acetaldehyde are commonly cited in popular literature, but dehydration is just one symptom (one easily prevented or fixed at that) among many, and hangovers typically are at their worst when acetaldehyde already has dropped to a low level. Sugary drinks make hangovers worse due to the formation of lactates, but eliminating sugar will not eliminate hangovers, only marginally lessen the severity. The most promising idea is that hangovers are an inflammatory immune system reaction. This hypothesis is supported by a high positive correlation of the production of cytokine (an immune system signaling molecule) with hangovers. This is why anti-inflammatories (including plain old aspirin) do help.
 
The simplest solution, as the finger-waggers among us always tell us (correctly, unfortunately), is not to overindulge in the first place. Bishop-Stall’s book is a cautionary tale in this regard too. His boozy research, which lasted several years, cost him dearly in his personal life as intemperate lifestyles often do. Some argue, on the other hand, that one can overcorrect the other way. Raymond Chandler: “I think a man ought to get drunk at least twice a year just on principle, so he won't let himself get snotty about it.” Perhaps, though Raymond might have exceeded twice.
 

 Lefty Frizzell & Johnny Bond - Sick, Sober And Sorry (1957)