From Ancient Rabies Cures to the Breakfast Table Explore the strange evolution of the “Hair of the Dog” philosophy, a journey that begins with literal dog-hair poultices for rabies bites and ends with the birth of the modern breakfast cereal industry. Discover how the ancient logic of “like cures like” moved from folk magic to 19th-century homeopathy, eventually shaping the way we market health foods today.
We have all heard the advice: if you woke up with a pounding head and a “cotton mouth” from last night’s indulgences, the only solution is a little bit more of what caused the problem. This is the “hair of the dog,” a phrase so common we rarely stop to consider its strange literal meaning. While it sounds like a simple excuse for a morning cocktail, the logic behind it—that a source of injury can also be its cure—is a thread that runs through the history of ancient folk magic, 19th-century medical movements, and even the birth of the American breakfast cereal industry.
The Hair of the Dog and Like Cures Like
Hair of the dog is actually short for “the hair of the dog that bit you.” It means taking a little drink, or a big drink of alcohol, to cure a hangover. The idea is that “like cures like.”
If alcohol got you where you are now, then more alcohol will dig you out. Whether this really works or not is a subject of debate, of course. Certainly, alcohol will not cure an alcohol hangover. There is nothing that will for sure cure one.
For some, more alcohol may blunt some of the symptoms, temporarily, but all you’re doing is adding more alcohol and increasing the load on your body, prolonging the effect. Many people cannot stand the thought of drinking more the night after a binge. This ability has a lot to do with tolerance if nothing else.
But, why do we call a morning-after nip “hair of the dog (that bit you)?” The idiom has been around at least since the 1500s. The earliest print reference is a collection of English proverbs by John Heywood, from 1546:
I pray thee let me and my fellow have
A hair of the dog that bit us last night
And bitten were we both to the brain aright
We saw each other drunk in the good ale glass2
In fact, this advice shows up in recipes and “household advice” books from the 1600s. Drink too much? Have a little nip the next morning!
The Literal Origin of Hair Of the Dog
The idiom in its modern sense may have nothing to do with a dog’s hair, but it does stem from the same source. It comes from the quite ancient belief that if you were bitten by a dog, a poultice of hair from the same animal, pressed against the bite, would either help heal the bite.
If it didn’t heal the bite, it would at least “protect you from the evil consequences of the bite.” This may have been a reference to rabies, which, no doubt, was thought to be a possession by some kind of evil spirit, or the like.
The belief that the hair of the dog that bit you was a cure for the bite was firmly believed in ancient Britain. I’ve read references, although I cannot confirm their authenticity, of a woman suing a man after the man’s dog bit her, saying that she would not have done so if only he had given her some of the dog’s hair!
Sometimes, instructions for this dog bite treatment specifically advised cutting the hair off the tail.
Of course, the hair of a dog was not the only ancient cure. For instance, it was also claimed that if you were bitten by a “mad dog,” you would also go mad unless you killed the dog at once.
Simply Mad About Bezoars
Another surefire rabies preventative was the madstone or bezoar. It was believed to draw out the poison if you pressed the stone against the bite. If the dog was not mad, the stone would just fall off. If the dog were mad, the stone would adhere to the wound until all the poisons were drawn out.
As you can surmise, the stone was named after the very condition it was meant to protect against, madness. These stones were also thought to cure snake bites.
A madstone was actually a hard accretion, called a calculus, sometimes found in the stomach of ruminant animals that chew their cud, such as deer, from which the very best madstones were said to come. They were believed to have been formed in the animal as a reaction to and protection from poisons. If an animal got rabies, the “madstone” was the result. Thus, the stone cure was based on the same ancient principle of “like cures like.” The stone was formed by madness or poison; thus, the stone can cure poisoning.
Madstones or bezoars have a long history of being poison antidotes, as well as possessing many magical properties. Harry Potter fans may be familiar with them!
While these ancient cures eventually fell out of fashion, the underlying logic, that a ‘poison’ can be its own antidote, didn’t disappear. It simply moved from the realm of folk magic into the formalized world of 19th-century medical movements, most notably Homeopathy.
The Lore of “Like Cures Like”
While “Hair of the Dog” remained a folk idiom, the late 18th century saw this philosophy formalized into Homeopathy. Based on the “Law of Similars,” it suggested that a substance causing symptoms in a healthy person could, in extreme dilutions, cure those same symptoms in a sick one.
The Poison Paradox: Just as folk magic used a rabid dog’s hair to treat its bite, homeopaths used notorious toxins like Belladonna (Deadly Nightshade) and Arsenic to treat the very conditions those poisons produced.
The Duck Liver Remedy: This logic led to some truly strange “cures,” like the popular flu remedy Oscillococcinum. It’s based on a 1917 theory involving an “oscillating bacterium” found in the heart and liver of a Muscovy duck, the ultimate culinary-to-medical stretch.
The Dilution Effect: The key was the “infinitesimal dose”. By diluting the “poison” until virtually no molecules remained, practitioners believed the water “remembered” the curative properties, a far cry from the physical poultice of a dog’s tail.
From Toxic Tinctures to the Breakfast Table
This era of “toxic medicine” and diluted cures eventually created a massive cultural backlash. It was from this specific environment that health reformers like John Harvey Kellogg and C.W. Post emerged. They viewed the standard 19th-century American diet, heavy on meat, ale, and questionable “cures” like Arsenic as a biological poison that required a systemic antidote.
Leveraging the same “natural cure” language found in homeopathic journals, they marketed the first breakfast cereals not as a convenience food, but as a curative. By replacing a morning nip of ale or a dose of patent medicine with a bowl of processed grains, they promised to restore the body’s balance. In a way, the modern cereal aisle is the ultimate commercial evolution of the “Hair of the Dog” philosophy: a ritual designed to fix the perceived damage of the modern diet. Only, instead of an emergency cure, this was a daily fix.
The Legacy of the Cereal Cure
While we’ve long since traded literal dog hair poultices for more scientific treatments, the “Hair of the Dog” philosophy never truly left our kitchens. The early breakfast cereal industry wasn’t just selling a convenient meal; it was selling a standardized, industrial version of the like cures like doctrine, using grain-based “purity” to counteract the perceived toxins of the modern lifestyle.
Today, that 19th-century marketing DNA survives in the way we talk about “superfoods,” restorative diets, and even fantastic claims about chlorophyll. We are still sold the idea that our food can function as a specific antidote to our environment, often through pseudoscientific trends like the alkaline diet scam.
However, modern food science offers a more nuanced reality. While we may worry about the “yoga mat” chemical in bread, the truth is that the idea that most diseases are caused by eating “wrong” food is a drastic oversimplification.
Whether it’s a morning-after cocktail or a bowl of heart-healthy bran, the underlying hope remains the same, that the right ritual at the breakfast table can undo the damage of the day before. Yet, there is a limit to how much eating the “right” food can actually make you feel better once the “bite” has already happened.
