Hangover Cure

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Sandra. Now I’m calling from Indianapolis, Indiana.

Hiya, Sandra. How are you?

I’m doing well. Thank you.

All right. What’s up?

I had a question about an origin of a phrase.

I was wondering about hair of the dog, or sometimes you’ll hear hair of the dog that bit you.

-huh. -huh. And in what context do you hear this?

Well, mostly it’s if someone has had a little too much to drink and they’re hungover.

You’ll hear someone say, well, how about a little hair of the dog and offer them more alcohol.

Somehow that’s supposed to make them feel better.

I don’t understand that exactly.

And we had been on a trip and had been bike riding.

And we did the Virginia Creeper Trail in Abingdon, Virginia.

And I’m not much of a bike rider, and I was hurting for several days afterwards.

When we got home, we have an exercise bike in the living room.

And my husband was like, here, why don’t you get on there?

That’ll make you feel better.

And I said, oh, yeah, hair of the dog.

And that’s kind of how it came up, and we just were discussing what that possibly meant.

If a dog did bite you and somebody gave you some hair from that dog,

I’m not sure what you’d do with it, make a stab, you know, a wound,

Or make a little voodoo dog and stick pins in it to get your revenge.

I mean, we were just kind of kicking around ideas about what that possibly meant.

So the way you used it was kind of like to get back on the horse after the horse has thrown you, right?

Right.

Well, he was saying, yeah, if I rode some more, that I would feel better.

And I did not think that was the case.

Well, the way you would use the dog hair is you would take a little bit of dog hair, some soot, and some ham fat,

And then you would rub it right into the dog wound.

Oh.

And that would make it better, huh?

Well, that’s what the folk remedy is.

Okay.

It’s known in Latin.

No, seriously.

That’s one of the formulas for if a dog bites you,

Especially in a case of rabies or hydrophobia,

That was one of the folk remedies to supposedly solve that.

Okay, for a dog bite.

For a dog bite.

This expression in various forms,

The hair of the dog or the hair of the dog that bit me goes back about 450 years.

In Latin, you will sometimes see it in the old medical manuals as crinus, canis, rabidi.

Oh, there you go.

Okay.

Right, which is the hair of the dog, the rabbit dog.

Yeah.

Right.

So, Sandra, the whole idea here is supposedly the thing that injures you is also the thing that cures you.

And there might be a little bit of wisdom to this folk remedy because if you can catch a rabbit dog and pluck some of its hair,

Then you’ve got a good chance of killing it so it won’t bite somebody else.

So in one way, it’s kind of a preventive measure, more than it is a remedy.

So it did literally mean to get some of the hair and put it on the bite.

Yep.

Okay.

I just couldn’t imagine how that would possibly help, but okay.

In the earlier centuries, before modern medicine came along, there were all sorts of these things that you would do.

Well, it’s interesting that these days you think of it usually in terms of what she was talking about in terms of a hangover, right?

A Bloody Mary for breakfast.

Yeah, it’s interesting how it kind of migrated just to that one specific use, right?

Right.

Yeah, we don’t use it in another context.

Right.

People have been getting hungover for hundreds of years.

Mm—

Well, that’s great.

Well, thank you for calling.

We appreciate it.

Well, thank you.

All right.

Thank you so much.

Appreciate it.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Grant, I remember reading a few years ago in the Annals of Internal Medicine, they were

Proposing a medical term for hangover.

What was it?

It was visalgia.

Oh, right.

Sure.

I remember that.

Do you?

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, come on.

Really?

I think I might have an entry for it on my website, actually.

Is that right?

Yeah, V-E-I-S-A-L-G-I-A.

I don’t know if it ever took, though, but it’s still in use here and there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It comes from a Norwegian word meaning uneasiness after debauchery.

That’s the normal case, isn’t it?

Yes, exactly.

Vysalgia.

So a little hair of the dog for your visalgia.

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