THE perennial debate on alcohol and health is weighted heavily against the former. While occasional reports do emerge on the benefits of moderate drinking, notably on lowering the risk of heart disease, they are drowned out by condemnation of the demon drink. In Scotland there’s a pervasive view, particularly from the health lobby, that booze will only ever be a problem.
So it’s strange that the history of medicine and alcohol are in fact intimately bound, indeed the dividing line between them was often blurred. In her new, highly readable book, Gin – a Toast to the Most Aromatic of Spirits (Carlton Books, £10.99), Geraldine Coates traces these roots. She writes of how 11th-century Benedictine monks at Italy’s medical school in Salerno “drew on the records of Greek and Arab scholars to create medicines based on combining spirits with various herbs, spices, berries and roots”.
Coates speculates that gin was probably born there. The Dutch might dispute that, for genever – their word for juniper – has long been the country’s national drink.
From the Netherlands it crossed the channel as a medicinal spirit known as juniper water that folk like Samuel Pepys carried round London as a restorative and a cure for indigestion. Before long it became fashionable with the accession of King William II and the Glorious Revolution when gin emerged as a patriotic, protestant spirit that was soon cheaper than beer.
With the early 18th-century gin craze that swept through London, any link to health and medicine went out of the window. Coates quotes the Anglo-Dutch philosopher Bernard Mandeville’s musings on “Intoxicating Gin that charms the inactive, the desperate and the crazy of either Sex”. Thanks largely to gin, a child born in London had a one in four chance of surviving beyond the age of five in the 1740s.
Lowland distillers back then sent raw spirit south to be rectified into gin. Today the Scots are fuelling a more civilised gin boom with the likes of Hendricks in Girvan, Caorunn from Speyside, The Botanist on Islay and boutique gins. There may be a Darwinian survival of the fittest, but Coates is convinced the new craze is here to stay.
Gin – a Toast to the Most Aromatic of Spirits by Geraldine Coates is published by Carlton Books, priced £10.99.
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