Camper English - Doctors and Distillers: The Remarkable Medicinal History of Beer, Wine, Spirits, and Cocktails

PRAISE FOR DOCTORS AND DISTILLERS

At last, a definitive guide to the medicinal origins of every bottle behind the bar! From prehistoric beer to exotic French liqueurs, a swig of alcohol has always served as tonic and treatment. With a cocktail nerds love of obscure ingredients and a passion for odd historical details, Camper English illuminates the murky, confounding, and even grotesque history of booze as medicine. This is the cocktail book of the year, if not the decade.

Amy Stewart, author of The Drunken Botanist and Wicked Plants

Mr. English has written a fascinating book that makes a brilliant historical case for what Ive been saying all along: alcohol is good for you.... Okay, maybe its not technically good for you, but he shows that through most of human history, its sure beat the heck out of water.

Alton Brown, creator of Good Eats

Camper English is the booze writers booze writerthe one we all turn to for true histories, unassailable facts, and clarity (of both explanation and ice). Doctors and Distillers puts his magnificent brain on full display, laying out the coiled-together histories of drinking and medicine. Every page has at least three wait, I didnt know that! moments, and the bibliography will launch 1,000 magazine-article history sections.

Adam Rogers, author of Proof: The Science of Booze

Doctors and Distillers is an eye-opening compendium of the unlikely, often dodgy, always colorful alchemical-medicinal backstories of alcohols in all their stupefying variety: itll bring a little something extra to whatever you sip.

Harold McGee, author of On Food and Cooking and Nose Dive

I must tell you that I fully believe that fermentation is actually magic. At the very least I think we can all agree that alcoholic drinks, properly administered by a judicious hand, can be medicine. Dive into these pages and you will learn the raucous and unlikely true tale of how every alcoholic drink from beer, wine, and bitters to the vanished and banned cocaine drinks of the nineteenth century, were once thought to banish all manner of ills. Better yet, youll be grandly entertained. I predict that by the last page youll find yourself feeling oddly... better.

Garrett Oliver, editor in chief, The Oxford Companion to Beer and brewmaster of The Brooklyn Brewery

When the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote that reading nourishes the intellect and study banishes fatigue, Im pretty sure he was thinking about Doctors and Distillers, or at least would have been if hed stuck around to read it. In any case, Mr. English has written as an instructive and entertaining a book as I can conceive.

David Wondrich, editor in chief, The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails

Equal parts science textbook and historical narrative, Doctors and Distillers is a beautifully researched and thoroughly engaging trip through the story of some of our most beloved libations.

Jeffrey Morgenthaler, author of The Bar Book

Camper has always written with the rare combination of eye-opening insight and delightful wit, and in Doctors and Distillers he outdoes himself masterfully. A globe-spanning and impeccably researched work that reaches deep into humanitys relationship with alcohol, this is no dry textbookDoctors and Distillers pulls the veneer off of subjects clouded in mystery and hyperbole, exposing the history of beer, wine, spirits, and cocktails as critical in understanding modern health, medicine, and our persistent human desire to understand the universe and our place in it.

Alex Day, partner at Death & Co., and author of Cocktail Codex

Want a prescription of gin, whiskey, beer, or cocaine? Well, youll need to travel back in time for these doctor-given elixirs. And thats exactly what Camper English does in Doctors and Distillers. He beautifully tells the story of how alcohol kept the world healthy and provides recipes for you to make at home. You know, just in case you get a case of 1800s-era hay fever.

Fred Minnick, author of Whiskey Women and Bourbon Curious

A boozy and breezy romp through medical history, Doctors and Distillers is an intoxicating read. Buy two copies: one for your bar and one for your bookshelf.

Nate Pedersen, coauthor of Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything

Channeling the witty satire of Mencken, to-the-point prose of Hemingway, and unsentimental wit of Embury, English overlays meticulously researched histories of medicine, spirits, and mixology chronologically, revealing eyebrow-raising insights about the anthropological context thats propelled the inseparable relationship between spirits, mixed drinks and medicine dating back to antiquity.

Jim Meehan, author of Meehans Bartender Manual and The PDT Cocktail Book

penguin books

Camper English is a cocktails and spirits writer and speaker who has covered the craft cocktail renaissance for more than fifteen years, contributing to more than fifty publications around the world, including Popular Science, Saveur, Details, Whisky Advocate, and Drinks International. With a focus on the nerdy side of mixology, he has studied everything from the history of carbonation to the science of clear ice cubes. He has been awarded International Cognac Writer of the Year by the Bureau National Interprofessionnel du Cognac and Best Cocktail Writer at the Tales of the Cocktail Foundation Spirited Awards, and he has been voted as one of the one hundred most influential people in the global drinks industry for several years running. He lives in San Francisco.

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Copyright 2022 by Camper English

Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

An earlier version of the chapter Tonic: Malaria, Mosquitoes, and Mauve was originally self-published, in different form, as Tonic Water AKA G&T WTF, in 2016.

library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

Names: English, Camper, author.

Title: Doctors and distillers : the remarkable medicinal history of beer,

wine, spirits, and cocktails / Camper English.

Description: New York : Penguin Books, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021058521 (print) | LCCN 2021058522 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143134923 (paperback) | ISBN 9780525506591 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Alcoholic beveragesTherapeutic useHistory. | Drinking of alcoholic beveragesHealth aspects--History. | TherapeuticsHistory. | MedicineHistory.

Classification: LCC RM257.A42 E54 2022 (print) | LCC RM257.A42 (ebook) | DDC 615.7/828dc23/eng/20220209

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021058521