Smarty Pants From The American Scholar

The Pain Killer, the Penicillin, the Doctor—some cocktail menus lean heavily on the idea of “self-medication.” But for millennia, alcohol was medicine. Weak beer was safer to drink than water, and eau de vie was distilled from any number of fruits to treat colic or a cold. Though the ancient Greeks wrote at length about the medical applications of wine, even earlier uses for fermented beers and beverages appear on Sumerian tablets, Egyptian papyri, and Vedic texts. Cocktail connoisseur Camper English, who has been covering the drinks industry for more than 15 years, turns his attention to this long and storied history in Doctors and Distillers, which traces modern mixology back to its therapeutic roots. Go beyond the episode:Camper English’s Doctors and Distillers: The Remarkable Medicinal History of Beer, Wine, Spirits, and CocktailsRead English’s series on four bitter botanicals: cinchona bark, rhubarb root, wormwood, and gentianEnglish’s blog Alcademics has a wealth of cocktail-related articles, inclu