Sixpack Sez

March 27, 2009 | Medicinal beer - good for what ale's ya?

EVERY COUPLE of months, another medical journal publishes groundbreaking research into the benefits of drinking beer. It's good for your heart. It prevents cancer. It prolongs your life.

The latest study says it builds stronger bones.

Nothing new here. Beer and medicine go way back, and I'm not talking about those hair-of-the-dog remedies for curing Saturday morning hangovers.

Pneumonia, friends - it's a scientific fact that lager cures pneumonia.

At least, that's what Dr. Charlton R. Gulick reported in an 1886 edition of the New York Medical Journal. Describing the illness that had a patient on his deathbed, Gulick wrote:

"Electricity was first used, then quinine, and then digitalis. The use of the drugs was pushed to the fullest extent, and finally Duquesnel's Digitalin was used hypodermically, but this proved exceedingly objectionable to the patient, and lager beer was ordered. Within 72 hours marked improvement was observed . . .

"Dr. Gulick commends the use of lager beer in rebellious cases of functional derangement of the heart."

Never mind that the stunning case study was published just above another report promoting the use of cocaine to reduce labor pains. This was just more evidence of the therapeutic value of beer.

In 1881, the Philadelphia County Medical Society accepted it as a given when it reviewed a paper titled, "When Should Malt Liquors be Preferred to Wines and Spirits in the Treatment of Disease?"

In 1906, Dr. Paul Bartholow, professor emeritus at Philadelphia's Jefferson Medical College, reported that "beer, ale and porter are much and justly esteemed as stomachic tonics and restoratives in chronic wasting diseases."

Even patients suffering DTs, the good doctor proclaimed, benefited from a glass of ale.

In 1918, one of New York's leading physicians, Dr. Abraham Jacobi, proclaimed in the journal Medical Economist that "there is hardly a human organism which is not favorably influenced" by beer.

For reasons unknown, physicians seemed to favor dark beer.

In 1852, the Medical Times and Gazette of London marveled at the case of an elderly patient who survived for 15 years on nothing more than a daily teaspoon of cod liver oil and his beloved Scotch ale.

"With his pint of Scotch ale, he always smoked a pipe of tobacco, and, considering his advanced age and all the circumstances of his case, he slept well, and suffered but comparatively little," his doctor reported.

Eighty years later, a physician writing in the Journal of the Medical Society of New Jersey said, "I scarcely ever met a man who could withstand the soporific effects of bottled stout. It is far better than opium and induces a more nearly natural sleep."

Beer was so commonly accepted as an agent of good health that breweries frequently advertised their products in medical journals.

An ad in a 1900 edition of The Interstate Medical Journal of St. Louis touts the nutritional benefits of Burton Stock Ale and asks physicians to share their medical opinions. Meanwhile, the makers of malt extract advertised their dubious (but potent) product like snake oil, promising to cure a litany of maladies, including consumption, dyspepsia, defective nutrition, bronchitis and "chronic catarrh."

Beer wasn't just good medicine for adults, either. The Medical Standard, published in Chicago, advised in 1909 that "Hot milk poured into an equal quantity of good ale or beer makes an excellent going-to-bed drink, and for puny, restless and scrofulous children."

And when one temperate writer complained in 1881 to the British Medical Journal that a school for orphans spent more on beer for its students than milk, the editors replied, "Much obliged, but hardly of sufficient medical interest."

Sadly, the prescribed use of beer to cure disease mostly died out with the Prohibition.

But not without a fight.

Following passage of the Volstead Act, many doctors exploited a loophole that permitted them to prescribe alcohol for "non-beverage purposes."

The anti-saloon forces objected, but U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer issued an opinion backing the practice and even suggested beer could be poured from drugstore soda fountains.

In Pennsylvania, meanwhile, Harrisburg gave physicians the go-ahead to prescribe up to one case of beer per patient, to be filled at licensed pharmacies (sorry, no refills).

Naturally, the debacle ended up Congress and, in an episode that echoes today's controversy over the medical benefits of marijuana, doctors testified that politics was standing in the way of good medicine.

Congress didn't buy it. In 1922, it enacted a bill limiting the prescription of wine and liquor to just a half pint every 10 days.

Beer, that wonderful cure-all, was banned completely.

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