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- [00:00]
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Tracy B. Wilson
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Holly Fry
In six months welcome to Stuff youf Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.
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Tracy B. Wilson
Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson.
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Holly Fry
And I'm Holly Fry.
- [00:47]
Tracy B. Wilson
It is New Year's Day, if you're listening to this episode on the day that it's coming out. So we're gonna talk about hangovers in history. No reason.
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Holly Fry
Happy New Year. It is likely that hangovers predate humanity. Alcoholic beverages start with yeast breaking down sugar from foods like honey or fruit, producing ethanol and carbon dioxide. The species of yeast most associated with this fermentation is Saccharomyces cerevisiae, also called brewer's yeast or baker's yeast, although there are others. Yeast has been around for hundreds of millions of years, although it's less certain when these particular yeasts developed. But fruit has been around for at least 80 million years. Once fruit and these yeasts existed at the same time and place, there would have been opportunities for natural fermentation.
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Tracy B. Wilson
People who live near orchards or vineyards or places with lots of fruit around often have stories about animals becoming intoxicated after eating fermented fruit. Our long ago ancestors may have witnessed this and decided to try it for themselves, or they may have just happened to eat fermented fruit and discovered that it had an effect on them. But logically, if they ate enough of it, they could have woken up the next day with symptoms like a headache, nausea, sensitivity to light and sound, fatigue and anxiety, or a sense of dread, those symptoms that together today are known as a hangover.
- [02:24]
Holly Fry
Based on residues on pottery fragments, humans had probably started fermenting things on purpose by about 10,000 BCE. Although there's some debate about whether intentional fermentation started with fruit or honey to make wine or mead, archaeologists have also found a recurring pattern in several parts of the world in which the first evidence of people fermenting grains to make beer followed those people transitioning from being nomadic to forming sedentary agricultural communities. This has led to some debate on whether people turned to agriculture to get access to more grains so they could brew beer, or or if they discovered the alcoholic potential of grains after first becoming an agricultural society.
- [03:08]
Tracy B. Wilson
Regardless, though, people from virtually every part of the world have been making some kind of alcoholic beverage for thousands of years, so it seems likely that people have experienced hangovers for all of that time. Distilling has also been around for thousands of years, although it probably started out being used to make medicines and perfumes instead of spiritus liquors. There's documentation of wines being distilled into spirits in multiple parts of the world by around the year 800. Logically, access to beverages with a higher concentration of alcohol may also have led to more hangovers.
- [03:51]
Holly Fry
We keep saying things like logically and probably because hangovers are tricky to study. We don't actually know for sure if fermented fruit would have caused hangovers in our early hominid ancestors, but if their physiology was similar enough to ours and they ate enough of it, it seems likely. The first medical descriptions of a hangover may be in the Sashruta Samhita, which was written in Sanskrit in the 6th century BCE, and it's one of the foundational texts of Ayurveda. We talked about the Sashruta Samhita in our episode on Sashruta in 2019. In the Sashruta Samhita, the condition was called Parramatta, and it was described as involving thirst, head and joint pain, a sense of heaviness in the body, and the loss of taste. The Insinger Papyrus, which dates to around the first century BCE in Egypt, describes someone who has drunk too much wine as keeping to bed with aching hair.
- [04:51]
Tracy B. Wilson
Today, thousands of years later, there's still not an exact medical understanding of hangovers. A lot of things seem like they're probably involved, like alcohol is a diuretic, so people can become dehydrated after drinking. Alcohol also causes inflammation, and with heavy alcohol use, this can be systemic. Alcohol consumption can cause blood sugar to drop, and that can cause symptoms like tiredness or shakiness. People often don't sleep as well if they've been drinking, and that interrupted sleep can play a part, too. Alcohol breaks down into a number of metabolites, some of which are toxic, and those metabolites have their own effects on the body's symptoms. There are also some parallels between hangover symptoms and withdrawal symptoms in people who have a history of misusing alcohol, although withdrawal can also include symptoms that are a lot more serious, like seizures or Hallucinations. So there is also an idea that a hangover could be a very mild withdrawal.
- [05:58]
Holly Fry
But there's not much medical research into what specifically is going on in the body or how a hangover impacts a person's physical and cognitive functioning while it's going on. One reason is that it's possible for someone to develop a hangover after drinking only a small amount of alcohol. But hangovers are generally more likely with heavier consumption. There are also a lot of factors that can affect a person's susceptibility to hangovers, including genetics, how often a person drinks, various other habits. They may have medications, they may be on, the ingredients in their drinks, or the kinds of alcohol they're drinking. The variables just go on and on. And there are some ethical issues around intentionally having someone drink enough to try to give them a hangover, especially since alcohol has very well known, very well established negative health effects, including being a known carcinogen.
- [06:55]
Tracy B. Wilson
The historical record on hangovers can also be tricky to try to pick through. Alcoholic beverages have existed in virtually all of the world for pretty much all of recorded history. And in a lot of places, places even before, attitudes about alcohol are really all over the place. And these attitudes change and evolve over time. By extension, the same is true about the after effects of alcohol consumption. So, as an example, in a culture where there are strong taboos against alcohol consumption, there might not be much documentation on people's drinking habits or their after effects beyond condemning people who drink. Or in a culture in which most people routinely drink, moderately mild hangovers might just be seen as a fact of life and barely worth commenting on. Also, it may be possible to tell whether somebody drank heavily in their lifetime by examining their remains. So when we're studying burial sites or archaeological areas, but we can't tell whether they experienced a hangover from that or if they did what they thought about that.
- [08:06]
Holly Fry
Sometimes it's also not totally clear whether a historical source is talking about hangovers or intoxication. For example, seemingly every article on historical hangover cures includes a reference to Pliny the Elder, who lived in the first century ce and his recommendation of the eggs of an owlet as a hangover cure. But this remedy is in a section of his Natural History covering intoxication. It doesn't seem like he's recommending this for hangovers, but for the state of being inebriated. But this is also a work that's being translated into English almost 2000 years after it was written.
- [08:46]
Tracy B. Wilson
I saw those owlet eggs so many times while working on this episode. Some of the language around hangovers is also really recent, especially compared to how long hangovers have probably been around. You can't just go look for the word hangover in historical text in English because that word was not used in writing at all until 1894, and at that point it had a more general meaning of just an after effect. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first known written use of the word hangover in English to mean the symptoms that can follow alcohol consumption was in 1904, and that use was by Gideon.
- [09:31]
Holly Fry
Words, which was a pseudonym for humorous Charles Wayland Town. It was in the Foolish Dictionary, an exhausting work of reference to uncertain English words, their origin meaning legitimate and illegitimate use. Confused by a few pictures. One of the definitions in this humorous dictionary was for the word brain. The top floor apartment in the human block known as the cranium and kept by the Serra sisters, Sarah, Brum and Cerebellum, assisted by medulla oblongata. All three are nervous but are always confined to their cells. The brain is done in gray and white and furnished with light and heat, hot or cold water if desired, with regular connections to the outside world by way of the spinal circuit usually occupied by the intellect, brothers, Thoughts and ideas, and intelligence office, but sometimes sublet to Jag Hangover and company. This passage is also one of the examples in the Oxford English Dictionary's entry on the word jag, meaning a drinking bout, the state of being drunk, or as much liquor as a man could carry.
- [10:39]
Tracy B. Wilson
Language around hangovers has also evolved outside of English as well. Like when I was in French class in the 1990s, I learned that to say I have a hangover, you'd say j mal au cheveux, which means basically my hair hurts. But according to an article I read in Bon Appetit while working on this episode, nobody says that anymore. And now people call a hangover une gule de bois, which taken literally would be wooden mouth. I thought about including the word for hangover in a bunch of different languages as part of this episode, but after the whole Mallow chevreux incident, I realized I didn't really know whether any of this slang is still being used. Also, we would need to figure out how to pronounce it all. We have re recorded my bad French pronunciation a number of times at this point, and Casey has cut them all out for us.
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Holly Fry
We will talk about some references to hangovers in literature and art after we pause for a sponsor break.
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Tracy B. Wilson
Earlier, we mentioned that some of the historical writing about hangovers can be tricky because it might not really be about hangovers. It might be more about drunkenness. The same is true of depictions in artwork. It's extremely easy to find artwork depicting alcohol and alcohol consumption. It can be trickier, though, to know for sure if a piece of art is supposed to depict a hangover.
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Holly Fry
For example, there is Dutch painter Jan Steen's 1625 the Effects of Intemperance, and this depicts a group of people, probably a family, sitting on some stairs. One seems to be offering a glass of wine to a parrot sitting on a little perch. Three children in the background are feeding a meat pie to a kitten, and there are other children looking on. And one woman, presumably the children's mother, is sitting on the top step. She's in an iridescent pink and green skirt and a pink bed jacket with fur around the hem and cuffs. With her left arm resting on her bent knees and her head resting in the crook of her elbow, she has what looks like a hand rolled cigarette between the first two fingers of her right hand, which is dangling over her other knee. She could be inebriated or she could be too hungover to put a stop to the mayhem going on around her.
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Tracy B. Wilson
The social and moral impacts of drinking are a common theme in Jan Steen's artwork, and the same is also true in some of the other works that might depict a hangover. Another Example is an 1872 woodblock print by Shosai Ikei. This work is called Learn a Lesson From Drinking Sake. The first panel shows somebody having a meal along with some sake. He seems to be enjoying himself, but as he continues to drink, his situation looks progressively less fun and more chaotic. And in the final frame he is on a futon, partly covered by a blanket, vomiting, while three almost ghostly figures beat him with sticks. That feels like a hangover to me, but he possibly could still just be intoxicated. And then also some of this reminds me of some of William Hogarth's works, like A Rake's Progress, which we have talked about on the show before.
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Holly Fry
Before, fortunately, sometimes the title of the work can help clear things up. One example is French painter Henri Toulouse Lautrec's the Hangover Suzanne Valadon, which he painted in the late 1880s. Valadon was a former circus performer who had been in a relationship with Toulouse Ratrec for about two years, and the painting shows Valadon in profile, sitting with her elbows on a table and her head resting on her left hand. There's a half empty wine bottle and a mostly empty glass on the table, and she's looking into the distance with a scowl, as though she might have a headache. This painting has a lot of green and blue color and very sketchy brushwork that makes it all look kind of hazy.
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Tracy B. Wilson
This has some similarities to the Day after by Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, which was painted from 1894 to 1895. This time the subject is a woman lying on her back on a bed, her left arm hanging off of it and her hair spilling off the pillow toward the floor. She looks like she's probably asleep, and there is a table in one corner that has two glasses and two bottles on it. This painting is mostly in shades of white and brown, and it just makes everything feel kind of subdued.
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Holly Fry
In 1883, another Norwegian painter, Christian Krog, created a self portrait called the Next Day. The artist is looking out from the canvas, his hands on both side of his head, as though he's trying to hold in a headache. His nose is red, and everything else in the painting is in shades of tan and gray, and it looks kind of washed out and sickly.
- [15:47]
Tracy B. Wilson
The last pieces of visual art we're talking about are not of human beings. An Oktoberfest postcard by German illustrator Arthur Thiel, who lived from 1860 to 1936, says, Greetings from our Oktoberfest in German. And then at the bottom, oldest cat, also in German. A German word for hangover is kater, or tomcat, and this cat looks miserable. He's wearing a red kerchief with white polka dots knotted around his neck, almost like a little sailor's kerchief. But then he also has a white bandage tied around his head below his ears. One of his eyes is completely closed, and the other is only a little bit open and looks very red around the edges. Another German Artwork is a 1913 painting by Lovis Corinth called Katerfusstuck, or hangover Breakfast, depicting a breakfast plate with a fish on it that's probably pickled herring, which is part of what the German hangover breakfast typically includes.
- [16:53]
Holly Fry
People have also been writing about hangovers for centuries before the word was coined. There is an entire book by Jonathan Shears called the Hangover A Literary and Cultural History, which starts with the early modern period and explores hangovers as both a socio cultural and a psychological phenomenon. That book came out from Liverpool University Press in 2020. Rather than trying to give an overview of writing about hangovers throughout history, we're going to have just a couple of illustrative examples.
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Tracy B. Wilson
There are a lot of accounts of people's own experiences with hangovers in their letters and their diaries. Like past podcast subject Samuel Pepys, his diary mentions a lot of them without the word hangover, which didn't exist yet. Like his entry from September 22, 1660, ends quote, Today not well of my last night's drinking. Yet on April 3, 1661, his head was, quote, aching all day from last night's debauch. His diary entry for April 24, 1661 begins, quote, Waked in the morning with my head in a sad taking through the last night's drink, which I am very sorry for. So rose and went out with Mr. Creed to drink our morning draft, which he did give me in chocolate to settle my stomach.
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Holly Fry
As a segue into a discussion of hangover cures, here's something from the Contented Cuckold or Woman's Advocate by Reuben bourne, written in 1692. According to a 19th century entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, Bourne was a, quote, dramatist, belonged to the Middle Temple and left behind him a solitary and feeble comedy which has never been acted. So this snippet is a conversation between the characters of Sparkish and Friendly, and we will be doing a dramatic reading for you today. I am going to be Sparkish, and then Tracy will be Friendly. So it opens. Tis the wine I drank last night lies in my head. I wonder how you rub through with it so well as you do. I am as squeamish as a new married woman that's breeding her first child. When she is in one of her breeding fits, she resolves never to have any more children, and I, in one of my sick qualms, never to drink any more wine. But you see how quickly we break our resolutions. The first kind proffer and the first good company make us run the hazard of a disorder, though we have experienced the sad effects before.
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Tracy B. Wilson
Bear up, man. Ne'er give way and part good company for the headache or disaffected stomach. Tis so childish I am ashamed to hear thee name it. One bottle sets thee right again and makes thee sound as a rock. There's no medicine I know like it. Tis beyond all the pills in the world.
- [19:47]
Holly Fry
We're going to talk some more about hangover cures after we first pause for a sponsor break.
- [20:00]
Tracy B. Wilson
Similarly to how I thought we would talk about how to say hangover in a bunch of different languages. I thought this episode was going to include hangover cures throughout history and all around the world. But the the more I looked at all the hangover cures the more it started to just seem like every conceivable thing has been proposed as a hangover cure at some point. And it just started to feel like a very bizarre grocery list. So we're going to focus on a few specifics, starting with what Friendly was recommending to Sparkish back before the break, which is the hair of the dog. That's a shortening of the hair of the dog that bit you, meaning another drink. And some people take it to mean specifically another drink of what you were drinking the night before.
- [20:48]
Holly Fry
The origin of this phrase is a little bit vague. Some sources that Tracy used in this episode say that it started in England, and others say Scotland, and still others say it's Scandinavia. Regardless, the idea is that it supposedly comes from folk medicine involving actual dog bites. If someone was bitten by a dog, their wound would heal, or maybe they would not get rabies. If they got a hair from the dog that bit them and either put the hair right there in the wound or burned the hair and then put its ashes on the wound, that will not cure a dog bite. That will absolutely not prevent rabies. Rabies is fatal once symptoms develop, and a bite from a potentially rabid animal requires prompt medical treatment. So don't use these silly methods. Go to a doctor. We did a whole episode on this in May of 2022.
- [21:42]
Tracy B. Wilson
Yeah. Every single time there's some kind of incident involving a rabid animal, it feels like the comments on the social media are full of people who do not understand the seriousness of rabies. Some sources, though, point to something a lot older, not necessarily as the origin of this, but as an early example, and that is supposedly an ancient Greek playwri. In some sources, it's Antiphanes, who lived in the 4th century BCE, and other sources say it's the grammarian Athensius who lived in the 3rd century CE and ascribed it to Aristophanes, who lived in the 5th century BCE. Regardless of what Greek person is the supposed origin, the lines are the same, which is quote, take the hair. It is well written of the dog by which you're bitten. Work off one wine by his brother and one labor by another. That does not pass the sniff test for me. We're gonna say why?
- [22:42]
Holly Fry
No, it's because this source may be apocryphal. It's found in an 1894 edition of the Reverend Ebenezer Cobham Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. As part of his definition of hair of the dog that bit you, Brewer writes, quote, in Scotland, it is a popular belief that a few hairs of the dog that bit you applied to the wound will prevent evil consequences. Applied to drinks, it means if overnight you have indulged too freely, take a glass of the same wine next morning to soothe the nerves. If this dog do you bite soon as out of your bed take a hair of the tail in the morning. Brewer also included this dog bite cure under the section on superstitions in his Reader's Handbook of Allusions, References, Plots and stories with two appendices, and it appears in a ton of 19th and early 20th century books on homeopathy. Otherwise, these four lines mostly seem to show up in articles about hangovers.
- [23:44]
Tracy B. Wilson
It makes sense that this supposed Greek poem would be used as an example in homeopathy books, since the idea of like cures like is central to homeopathy, which was at its peak of popularity in the 19th century. Also say that there's the sort of appeal to ancient wisdom in there. Beyond that, though, in 1967, folklorist Frank M. Paulson published a paper in the Journal of American Folklore in which he talked about first encountering the hair of the dog folk belief about dog bites during a seminar on Scandinavian folklore. After the discussion turned to sympathetic magic.
- [24:29]
Holly Fry
Here's how Sir James George Fraser framed the idea of sympathetic magic in the Golden A Study of Magic and Religion. If we analyze the principles of thought on which magic is based, they will probably be found to resolve themselves into two first, that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause and second, that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed. The former principle may be called the law of similarity, the latter the law of contact or contagion.
- [25:07]
Tracy B. Wilson
So sympathetic magic is its own fascinating topic, and I've had the 17th century belief in weapon salve or powder of sympathy on my short list for a while. That was a salve or a powder that would be applied to a weapon that had harmed somebody in order to cure the wound that the weapon had made. I am not sure that can actually support a whole episode. This may be it for the discussion of weapon salve on our show, but I am so fascinated by this connection of the idea of hair of the dog as a hangover cure to both homeopathy and sympathetic magic.
- [25:46]
Holly Fry
The term hair of the dog as a hangover cure has been around in English at least since 1546 according to the Oxford English Dictionary, which can bring us back to Frank M. Paulson's paper on hangover cures Paulson's interest in hangover cures was piqued by the hair of the dog conversation that we mentioned a moment ago, followed by a random thing he heard a bartender say about a year later, which was that another patron at the bar must have a hangover because he was ordering a warm beer. So Paulson started talking to people and collecting their hangover cures, mostly in Detroit and Montreal, but in other places as well. He talked to 149 total informants and included more than 250 cures in his book, 10 of them being some variant on hair of the dog. That was in addition to 40 cures involving liquor and beer, 31 involving mixed drinks, and 11 involving food combined with liquor, but not framed as hair of the dog.
- [26:47]
Tracy B. Wilson
I have read a lot of papers in my life from an assortment of fields. I'm usually reading multiple papers every week while I work on this show, and I just want to take a minute to say this was one of the most delightful papers I have ever read in an academic journal. After relaying this whole story about the bartender and the warm beer and the bartender apparently just keeping warm beer on hand for the hangover patrons, Paulson says, quote, by the time my wife and I left an hour later, I had collected no less than eight different hangover cures, all as I to discover a part of that gigantic vortex of folklore almost fanatically believed by the general drinking public. And so the patrician of this collection, the hangover cures that he lists out, are presented as they were told to him by bartenders, bussers, and bar patrons from a range of occupations, like. Like if they were willing to tell him what they did for a living, at least. So it just reads like people talking to him like, quote, rare beef, as rare as you can get. It is the only thing that really helps. It works every time. Or quote, I'm 63 years old come Sunday, and I've had my share of hangovers. But if you want to know the truth, there's no cure. Except time, of course. You have to do what you can, and the best thing is to eat raw cabbage. That does help. Or quote, I've never had a hangover, but if I had one, I guess I'd drink a glass of tomato juice. Isn't that what people do?
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Holly Fry
In addition to all the various cures involving alcohol, this paper also has sections listing out foods, juices, milk and ice cream, sex, patent medicine, preventatives and avoidance, and miscellaneous. Patent medicine in this case is not what we might think of as patent Medicines with old timey hucksters selling a bottle of mostly alcohol out of a wagon. Those cures include baking soda in water, various amounts of aspirin, and a couple of people who said that they knew there was a pill to cure hangovers, but that that pill is being kept a secret.
- [29:01]
Tracy B. Wilson
Nobody said the words big pharma, but that was the vibe that, like the pharmaceutical companies or the doctors know, but they're not telling us. Both within and beyond this paper, there are some running themes and a lot of the things that people have proposed as hangover cures throughout history, especially in what we think of as like the West. Raw eggs come up a lot and hot sauce and things that are salty or fried. One thing that combines a lot of that is a prairie oyster, which contains a raw egg or egg yolk, Worcestershire sauce, hot sauce, and salt or pepper. And then you drink that like a shot.
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Holly Fry
No, thank you.
- [29:44]
Tracy B. Wilson
Nah, I don't want it either.
- [29:45]
Holly Fry
The origins of the prairie oyster aren't well documented, but it might have gotten its start intentionally as a hangover cure. A number of other foods and beverages have origin stories focused on hangovers as well. One of them we talked about in our third installment on eponymous foods. Eggs Benedict, named for Lemuel Benedict, who allegedly asked for poached eggs in a pitcher of hollandaise sauce after a night of overindulgence in 1894.
- [30:13]
Tracy B. Wilson
The Italian spirit Fernet was also originally a hangover cure and a more general cure all. Bernardino Branca developed this in 1895, and at the time, in addition to ingredients like chamomile, peppermint, cardamom and myrrh, it included grape infused spirits and opiates. It is still around today, minus the opiates as a type of amaro.
- [30:41]
Holly Fry
Another, of course, is the Bloody Mary, which combines the hair of the dog with multiple other frequently proposed hangover cures, including tomato juice, hot sauce and Worcestershire sauce. This drink was reportedly the invention of Fernand Petiot, bartender at Harry's Bar in Paris in 1921. Harry's Bar was owned by Harry McElhony, who published Harry's ABC of Cocktails that same year. A later edition of this cocktailed book calls it a Red Mary, writing in shaker ice, three dashes of lemon juice, one dash of Worcestershire sauce, salt, cayenne pepper, one jigger of vodka, fill with tomato juice, shake well and strain in a large tumbler.
- [31:25]
Tracy B. Wilson
Yeah, I could not find the original 1921, but I thought, you know, who probably has this book, Harry's ABC of Cocktails is Holly. So the one Holly sent me was called something like the revised edition or New edition or something like that. There are multiple contradictory stories about who Mary is supposed to be in the drink Bloody Mary. One, of course, is Mary Tudor, Queen of England and Ireland, who was known as Bloody Mary. Another is just some other patron at the bar who was muttering under their breath about somebody named Mary. The story that I heard in college was that it was Ernest Hemingway and that it was about his wife Mary, because he was trying to find a way that he could drink without her smelling it on his breath. They did not meet until a couple of decades after the Bloody Mary was.
- [32:17]
Holly Fry
Invented, though the entire meal of brunch also has some ties to hangovers. One of the first written uses of the word brunch was in Brunch, a plea by guy Barringer in 1895. He doesn't specifically mention hangovers. Again, that word wasn't really coined yet. But he frames brunch as a good meal for after a night of drinking. He writes of it as a Sunday meal served around noon, saying, you are therefore able to prolong your Saturday nights, heedless of that moral last train, the fear of the next morning's reaction. It leaves the station with your usual seat vacant and many others unoccupied. Brunch a plea also ends Quote PS Beer and whiskey are admitted as substitutes for tea and coffee.
- [33:07]
Tracy B. Wilson
So do any of these cures or any of the innumerable other cures proposed throughout recorded history actually work for curing hangovers? Probably not. A lot of articles say that the hair of the dog specifically could potentially lead toward alcohol misuse. A December 2021 study was published in the journal Addiction that evaluated 21 placebo controlled randomized trials of purported hangover cures. These cures included curcumin extracted from turmeric, probiotics, supplements containing amino acids like L cysteine, clovenol extracted from clove buds, red ginseng, Korean pear juice, prickly pear, and artichoke. Some of these cures did show some statistically significant improvement in people's symptoms, but all of the evidence was very low quality. Eight of the studies included only male participants. So it's like even in the ones that did show some improvement, the the study itself wasn't robust enough to actually make that conclusion. The press release for this study ran with the headline, quote, no convincing scientific evidence that hangover cures work, according to new research. An earlier paper in the British Medical Journal in 2005 came to similar conclusions and also analyzed some of the studies that had already been published by that point. Both of these papers commented on the fact that there's just not a lot of high quality research into this area. Obviously that's not evaluating all of the hangover cures in the world, but it's enough research saying there's not a lot of evidence to broadly say, eh, probably not.
- [34:53]
Holly Fry
Yeah. Also, people aren't reporting their hangovers and everybody's body is different and reacts to different things. So it's you can't go off of anything except trying to get people drunk, which we discussed earlier has problems ethically. There is general agreement though, that the best treatment for a hangover is to avoid getting one in the first place by either not drinking alcohol or drinking in moderation, staying hydrated and possibly taking an over the counter pain reliever and a multivitamin before bed. But not one containing acetaminophen, which like alcohol is processed in the liver. None of this is medical advice, by the way.
- [35:33]
Tracy B. Wilson
Yeah, we're not doctors. That's just what came up repeatedly in a lot of articles as I was working on this episode, which feels to me like some stuff about hangovers.
- [35:47]
Holly Fry
Do you have listener mail?
- [35:49]
Tracy B. Wilson
I do. Our listener mail is from Yuan. The email says Holly and Tracy. Sarah Winnemaka the subject sent me a jolt. Could this be related to the town of Winnemucca, Nevada? Could it? On a long drive to winter vacation in Tri State Bear Lake, Utah In 2018, I chose Winnemucca for an overnight stay, largely because of a Flyer about the 150th anniversary of transcontinental railroad from San Jose's Chinese Historical and Cultural Project, in which my daughter joined its youth docent program, Winnemecca was a site of celebration. The Flyer noted that Dr. Sun Yatsen made a stop in its then Chinatown to raise funds for his imminent resolution. Our stop turned out to be mainly we were here. We arrived late in the afternoon. I had hoped to find nearby historical marks in the morning before heading back on the road, but Google was of little help. Chinatown is long gone and there's hardly a roadway landmark. The only object of interest I found in the brief driving around was the Ten Commandments cast on stone in front of a courthouse. So much for separation of church and state. All these years, Winnemucca has remained a mere waypoint on that memorable trip, and a talking point when my teen daughter wants to complain to her friends about how her dad chose a waypoint. Until you're two parter, that is. Even though you did not explicitly mention the town. Your talk brings the name and the territory to life. And yes, Google helped this time rather Wikipedia did. But even Wikipedia couldn't answer my question about incorporation and naming of the town. Given this much battle, bloodshed and betrayal suffered by Winnemucca's people. This American Life's miniseries on a road trip down the Trail of Tears doesn't specifically mention Winnemecca the chief or Winnemecca the town. As I have no pet to pay the pet tax, I hope you will accept pictures of Pig, the restaurant we dined at in Winnemucca. On the ceiling are dollar bills patrons signed, plus the courthouse. If you zoom in, you will see the inscription on the stone from the south. You must have seen lots of these. But Winnemucca being the only incorporated town in Humboldt county and all of that, I cannot say that I've visited many courthouses in California where I live either. So the novelty might just be my ignorance Belated Happy Thanksgiving, Yuan. So thank you for this email. Yuan is a regular correspondent with us. We've gotten lots of emails and I wanted to read this one for a couple reasons. One, yes, the town of Winnemucca, Nevada, probably named after Sarah Winnemucca's father, Winnemucca. But it also gives us a chance to kind of talk about Sarah Winnemucca's experiences with Chinese immigrants to the United States, which is also related to this email. So there was a big influx of Chinese immigrants into the US Starting with the Gold Rush, which was when she was a child, and then also a major part of the labor force in the transcontinental railroad, which came up in the email. And at various points in her work, Sarah Winnemucca talked and spoke about Chinese people and she would kind of frame Chinese immigrants as foreigners who were being welcomed into the United States, which was in comparison to her own people who were native to North America and were being oppressed. This was sort of a tool of rhetoric. It doesn't reflect the realities of Chinese immigrants treatment by or in the United States we talked about in so many previous episodes of the show. And this is something that she would have been aware of, especially because there were times that Chinese people faced some violence in the areas near where she lived. So it was like she had this thing in her rhetoric that was about her. Her perceptions of her people versus Chinese people doesn't quite align with like the reality. But at the same time she also would do things like try to de escalate conflicts between indigenous communities and Chinese communities when they were in some kind of dispute with one another. The town of Winnemucca, Britannica says that railroad officials renamed what had been French Ford after Winnemucca in 1868. But I found other references to possibly other people being the source of naming the town for Winnemucca. There are lots of places in the United States that are named with indigenous words or for indigenous peoples. And sometimes it's because somebody was a respected leader that the people who were like the. The white communities that were settling the area had a positive relationship with. With. Sometimes it has, like, a more complicated nuance where it was like the. Like the United States was explicitly trying to remove indigenous people from life, but also saw the Indigenous history of North America as like, something unique that needed to be preserved and kind of celebrated. And so it gets a little weird.
- [41:05]
Holly Fry
I always think of that in a similar way that I think about the way Victorian England became obsessed with a lot of other global cultures.
- [41:17]
Tracy B. Wilson
Oh, sure.
- [41:18]
Holly Fry
But they wanted them to be represented and preserved in a way that was palatable to them. And I kind of liken it a little bit to that.
- [41:28]
Tracy B. Wilson
Yeah, there's. I don't know if it's still there. I'm not sure if it's part of the permanent collection or if it is a temporary exhibit. But at the Museum of the. The Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. there's a huge, or was a huge exhibit that was on Indigenous names and imagery and advertising that is kind of on that same kind of theme of, like, indigenous people facing racism and oppression and genocide, but then also brands adopting Indigenous imagery for their products. One last little point of clarity on this is that the Trail of Tears is usually used to describe the forced removal from the southeastern US to what's now Oklahoma. And so the road trip that was on this American Life, which, to be clear, I have not listened to those episodes. It would not have gone as far west as Nevada. So, anyway, thank you so so much for this email and all of your other emails. Yuan has sent a number of emails, and they're always really great. And if you would like to send us a note about this or any other podcast or history podcast@iheartradio.com and you can subscribe to the show on the iheartradio app or wherever you like to get your podcast. Stuff youf Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite show.