People have been getting hammered on alcohol since the first monkey discovered overripe fruit could get them wasted, but people trying to quit is much more recent. Science once thought that it had discovered a miracle quaff, ether, that could knock you out during surgery and cure the thirst besides. There was a hitch, though: drinking ether made you fart more than you ever thought possible.

Library of Congress

Which was probably seriously distracting for the doctors.

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"It is said that God created the Drink, lest the Irish own the whole world." It's true that the Irish have a rep for drinking, as though Belarus didn't exist and Wisconsin was as dry as the Atacama Desert. In comparison, Ireland looks a little behind the curve. Shane MacGowan's best efforts notwithstanding, what really gave Ireland this reputation was an early temperance movement and a willingness to use the locals as bad examples in strange social experiments. One of those experiments was ether drinking.

In 1829, the Reverend John Edgar kicked off Ireland's temperance movement by pouring all the whiskey in his Belfast home out of a window into the street. We're not talking about that bottle hidden behind the bundt cake pan for special occasions, either: it being 1829, this was an entire barrelful. Both Catholics and Protestants in Ireland got into the act. A few years after Edgar's call for temperance, Father Theobald Mathew called for total abstinence from alcohol, and made it as far as New Orleans on that wave, not that abstinence had much of a chance there.