Hair of the dog

A remedy for a hangover involving more alcohol, based on the quirky notion that a small dose of the cause cures the effect, easing misery with irony.

From a medieval belief that a dog bite's cure was hair from that dog, applied to the wound-recorded in a 1546 proverb by John Heywood as 'hair of the dog that bit me. ' By the 17th century, Scots applied it to hangovers, with Ebenezer Brewer's 1850s dictionary noting whisky as 'hair. ' It reflects pre-modern medicine's like-cures-like logic, morphing into a droll drinking idiom as taverns and excess shaped British culture.