Had more champagne recently than you can handle?

Ever since human beings have been consuming alcohol—which began, scientists now believe, some ten million years ago with our not-quite-yet-human ancestors—imbibers have been suffering from its awful after-effects. The result of too much of a good thing is far from wonderful: a hideous mix of pounding headache, dry mouth, upset stomach, tremors, wooziness, and general misery known as a hangover. This malady has been with us for a long time, since the unhappy symptoms have been described by the ancient Egyptians, the ancient Greeks, and the authors of the Old Testament.

For millennia, desperate day-after sufferers have been looking for remedies. The Greeks swore by cabbage. Pliny the Elder, 1st-century CE