Book Review: Doctors and Distillers
Alcohol and medicine may seem two very disconnected and contradictory topics: a brief conversation with a doctor would confirm that alcohol is bad and medicine is good. But it’s more complicated and complex than that. There are (disputed) claims that drinking red wine in moderation is beneficial, and alcohol has—and continues to be—an integral ingredient to many medicines and treatments. Over time, this use of alcohol has led to a wonderful and astonishing array of drinks which started out as medicines but are now alcohol-based beverages.
Modern medicine has an antagonistic, neo-Prohibitionist attitude to alcohol, understandably given the illness, disease, and violence alcohol can induce. But there is a very long history of the use of alcohol in medicine. Much of this is outlined in Camper English’s fascinating and involving book, Doctors and Distillers: The Remarkable Medicinal History of Beer, Wine, Spirits, and Cocktails, in which Camper English demonstrates that doctors and distillers are historically and intrinsically connected. This is because of the limitations of medicine until the twentieth century, in part due to a folkloric medicinal approach, based on local herbs, flowers, roots, and spices with alcohol (usually distilled) used to make the medicine more palatable: quite simply, medicine tastes better if there is alcohol, sugar, and flavour. As an example Camper English references Mary Poppins: a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine goes down, but so too does the alcohol, which goes to the heart of the book and thousands of years of medicine.
In 1844, Christopher Penfold emigrated from the UK to South Australia, settling in the new city of Adelaide. A doctor, he set up a business making fortified wine which he marketed as medicine. After his death, his daughter and son-in-law took over the business and by the First World War the company made a third of all Australian wine, which continued to be mostly fortified until the 1960s and 70s. Also in the nineteenth century, the great sweet wines of Constancia in South Africa were referenced by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens for their medicinal benefits. Before advances in medicine, alcohol-based drinks were the best curatives most people had access to.
There are many spirits whose name means the water of life or similar: eau de vie, whiskey, vodka, aquavit, aguardemente. Water, up until the late nineteenth century, was a dangerous liquid to drink, spreading diseases such as cholera. Beer, wine, and distilled spirits were much safer to consume, even if the alcohol was dangerous in a different way. Alcohol-based liquid was used as a cure, especially for wounds; but it was also preventative, as it stopped the spread of disease.
This combination of medicine, alcohol, and drinking is seen in vermouth. The word vermouth comes from the German for wormwood, which is the key ingredient in the drink and has been used for medicinal purposes since ancient Greek times. It’s extremely bitter, so soaking it in alcohol makes it more palatable. In the late 1700s, these aromatised medicines became popular as an aperitivo in Torino, spreading to southern France and across Spain. The combination of bitterness from wormwood and other herbs, the sweetness from sugar, and aromas from other botanicals made vermouth a trend, which has recently been revived due to the cocktail boom. Vermouth from these countries, often based on traditional family recipes, is based on medicine: now they’re drunk on their own or in cocktails.
Gin is another drink whose character comes from the herbs, spices, roots, and flowers used to aromatise the spirit. In eighteenth-century England, the high alcohol transformed the medicinal benefits of the botanicals into a spate of alcoholism. But the botanicals used all have medicinal advantages: juniper, cardomom, anise, angelica, coriander, etc., which have been understood and used for centuries across different cultures. Gin and tonic became a popular drink in the nineteenth-century in India under British rule as the cinchona bark used in tonic water was a preventative for malaria (it’s also used in many other treatments and Italian amari, which are bitter digestivos). However, as it’s incredibly bitter mixing it with gin made the tonic more pleasant. This is the essence of the cocktail: mixing different drinks together to create a balanced, complex whole that integrates bitterness, sweetness, flavor, and, of course, alcohol.
Doctors and Distillers is a finely weighted appreciation of the relationship between alcohol and medicine, which involves many paradoxes: the extreme hedonism that resulted from Prohibition; that distillation was perfected by a Muslim alchemist; that alcohol is so important to the taste, body, and structure of a drink, but is so dangerous mentally and physically; that the use of botanicals may seem a form of homeopathic quackery (and Camper English writes about the quacks), but that hundreds of years of local use of botanicals suggests they have some health benefits—which have been translated into extremely pleasant drinks often used in sophisticated cocktails.
The relationship between medicine and alcohol is complicated and compelling, and Camper English has written an involving book that doesn’t make the subject too difficult but which explores its intricacies. The seemingly back-to-front conclusion is not that alcohol is good for you but that medicine has produced diverse, life-affirming alcoholic drinks which we continue to enjoy—in moderation of course.
