Veisalgia: The sober medical term for a hangover.
“There is no consensus definition of veisalgia (‘alcohol hangover’….)” (Ann Int Med, 2000)
From the Norwegian kveis (uneasiness following debauchery) + the Greek algia (pain).
Yes, it has been a very long time now since I’ve experienced the pain from uneasieness following debauchery. The last time I actually drank enough to put myself in that position was at a friend’s birthday almost a year ago, but that time I got the magical free pass and had no pain in the morning.
The last hangover worthy of the name that I can remember was almost four year ago, after a night of fondue with almost a dozen bottles of wine. Even that one wasn’t epic. I’m fairly certain I haven’t had an epic one since I moved out to the woods, partly due to age/wisdom and partly due to the logistical issues arising from living so far out of town. There might have been some time in the last few years that I’m forgetting, but it would have been on a trip out of town.
It’s shocking to me that it’s been so long. There was a time when I kept a bottle of ibuprofen on my headboard, so that when I woke up I could reach the pills with minimal movement. This was in response to multiple experiences with the dilemma of “if I don’t get the pills it will keep getting worse” versus “if I move it will get worse”.
Of course, I’m not unhappy about it. I always really hated hangovers, and I did find that the older I got, the worse they got with the same amount of drinking. I don’t know if that was physiological, or psychological, but if I never have a two-day hangover again, that’s fine with me. If I never again quote with feeling the Withnail and I line, “I feel like a pig shat in my head!”, that’s fine with me as well.
Still, when you don’t have one, there is something kind of romantic about the idea of a hangover, isn’t there? The idea that there’s something epic about them, or about what you went through to get to the point where you have one?
Kingsley Amis, in my opinion, authored the hands-down best description of a hangover in fiction in Lucky Jim:
“Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.”
I’m also kind of amused with the fact that modern medicine doesn’t really understand the hangover. In 2000 an interesting article, The Alcohol Hangover, in the Annals of Internal Medicine refers to the “mystery of the hangover” and the series of symptoms that “seem” to define it. It does focus on a few things we do know, including the fact that almost none of the things we think work for hangovers actually work, although there does seem to be something about B6. The article also notes that there is no strict medical definition for a veisalgia.
More amusingly, the article includes this bit of text:
R-E-M-O-R-S-E!
Those dry Martinis did the work for me:
Last night at twelve I felt immense,
Today I feel like thirty cents.
My eyes are blurred, my coppers hot,
I’ll try to eat, but I cannot.
It is no time for mirth and laughter,
The cold, gray dawn of the morning after.
–George Ade, The Sultan of Sulu, 1903
Yup. Glad I had a few back in the day, even more glad not to have them any more.
(In case you’re wondering, this post was motivated by a joke about how Wednesday morning must have felt to certain American political figures.)
