Katzenjammer, dog’s disease, barrel fever, brewer’s asthma, quart mania… I refer, of course, to the hangover. I’ve been working on a story about the history of slang, and for centuries its coiners have come up with a lot of ways to talk about one too many and the feelings it induces (mouth like the bottom of a birdcage, feeling like a boiled owl). For almost half a millennium, the best known “remedy” has been the hair of the dog that bit you (a phrase that goes back to at least 1546).

Can modern science do better? Companies have been marketing tonics that promise to mitigate the physical symptoms (and perhaps even the existential horror) that can accompany a hangover. Our Well informed column investigates. The best preventive action is still the boring one: don’t overdo it.