Certain Cure!

Just in time for the Christmas office party season, we have advice from William Vaughan's 1612 guide, Approved Directions for Health, via the Ask the Past blog.

The esteemed Mr. Vaughan suggests that a certain way to prevent drunkenness though one might "drinke great store of wine" is to beforehand consume the roasted lungs of a goat. Or possibly raw coleworts, which we would today probably label cabbage.

To sober up those who didn't dine on goat lungs before the party, one might again administer coleworts, or "great draughts of vinegar."

Although we commonly laugh at much of the medical advice given in past ages, I can see how this might work. I am pretty certain that if I ate the roasted lungs of a goat I would not get drunk, because there is no way that wine, liquor or anything else would stay down long enough for my body to process it. My stomach would begin working by the "Fool me twice, shame on me" principle.

But I think the cure for drunkenness is on shakier ground. While the consumption of large amounts of cabbage or great draughts of vinegar would probably have the same projectile effects as goat-lung casserole, millennia of research has yet to show any connection between upchucking and sobering up. Although laboratory conditions weren't present, personal anecdotal evidence from my own experimental phase backs this up.