*HIC* — A Grand History
of Hiccup Cures

Somewhere right now, a perfectly reasonable adult is bent at the waist, sipping water from the wrong side of a glass while their coworkers stare. Somewhere else, someone is swallowing nine individual grains of raw rice — one at a time, with great seriousness — while a friend counts aloud. And in a hospital, at some point in the last century, a physician wearing a white coat and an expression of professional composure performed a rectal massage to cure hiccups.

This is what hiccups do to people. They are, objectively speaking, nothing. A minor diaphragm spasm lasting three to five minutes. An involuntary twitch of the body’s least impressive muscle. And yet, across six thousand years of recorded human civilization, we have responded to them with the full arsenal of our ingenuity, our superstition, our folk wisdom, our firearms, and our willingness to do absolutely anything to make the sound stop.

What follows is a curated tour of humanity’s finest hiccup remedies — ranked, at last, on the only scale that matters: the Dignity Loss Index™, calibrated from 1 (you could do this in a board meeting) to 10 (you move towns afterward).

Before we proceed to the cures, a moment of silence for Charles Osborne of Anthon, Iowa, who in 1922 dropped a 350-pound hog and burst a blood vessel in his brain stem — the precise vessel, it turns out, that tells your body to stop hiccupping. He hiccuped nonstop for 68 years. His friends literally fired shotguns behind him to try to scare them away. It didn’t work. He received 4,000 letters of home remedies from sympathetic strangers. None worked. His hiccups stopped mysteriously in 1990, and he died a year later, presumably in blissful silence.

Charles is our patron saint. He is why we write this article. He is proof that hiccups, in sufficient quantity, become an identity. He appears in the Guinness Book of World Records, made appearances on Johnny Carson and Ripley’s Believe It or Not, and somehow still managed to get married twice and father eight children. The hiccup closed no doors for Charles Osborne. But still — 68 years. We owe it to him to at least understand the cures people tried.

Chapter I · Ancient Wisdom The Old World’s Best Guesses

The Ancient Greeks believed hiccups were a sign that someone, somewhere, was complaining about you. The cure, logically, was to figure out who it was. This makes hiccups the world’s earliest form of social anxiety monitoring, and the Greeks perhaps the earliest inventors of the stress-induced hiccup feedback loop.

The Ancient Romans, to their credit, were comparatively sensible: hold your breath and pinch your nose. This actually has a physiological basis. But the Romans also recommended sneezing, vomiting, and pulling on your own tongue, so let’s not give them too much credit.

In 10th-century England, hiccups were considered the work of elves and demons — and the cure was accordingly dramatic. One documented remedy required you to prepare a salve of herbs, draw a cross on yourself, and sing a religious verse in Latin. For those who didn’t know Latin (understandable), there was a backup: spit on your right index finger, draw a cross on the toe of your left shoe, and recite the Lord’s Prayer backward. This is a cure that requires more preparation than most IKEA furniture, and has roughly similar odds of success.

Chapter II · World Folk Remedies Grandmother Knows Best (She Doesn’t)

Across cultures, the folk remedy tradition for hiccups follows a remarkably consistent philosophy: identify the least dignified possible action and perform it with complete sincerity. From rural Philippines to the steppes of Central Asia, grandmothers have looked at a hiccuping grandchild and thought: yes, I know exactly what to do, and it will be humiliating.

In the Philippines, the cure is to tear a small square of paper towel, wet it, and apply it — wet side down — directly to your forehead. This is meant to look like a medical patch and presumably confuses the body into thinking something more serious is happening. No paper towel? Wet a piece of thread with saliva and apply that instead. The effect is the same. So is the look on your coworker’s face.

In parts of Latin America and Central Europe, a red string tied around the head or finger is the traditional remedy. No mechanism is offered. Vibes only. Dignity loss is minimal, but you do have to explain the string.

In the Sinti tradition (Romani people of Central Europe), you tie a key to a red string, wear it around your neck, and throw the key over your left shoulder. This costs you both a string and a key, and it is unclear what happens if the key lands on someone.

Chapter III · The Startle Arts Weaponizing Friendship Since Antiquity

A significant branch of hiccup medicine is devoted to the proposition that if you frighten something hard enough, it will stop doing what it’s doing. This theory is sound for bears, reasonable for toddlers, and entirely unverified for hiccups — but that has never dampened anyone’s enthusiasm for trying.

The mildest version is the classic jump scare: a trusted friend hides around a corner and shouts “BOO!” at you. The effectiveness varies. The resentment is reliable. The research supporting this method consists entirely of your aunt insisting it works on children.

A more committed version, historically documented with a straight face in medical literature, involves firing a gun nearby. Charles Osborne’s friend tried this — both barrels of a shotgun, directly behind him. Charles reported being “scared some” but the hiccups were entirely unbothered. The gun, it turns out, was more traumatized than the hiccup.

The most psychologically baroque startle method involves delivering sudden bad news — fabricated for medicinal purposes. “Your cow died!” was a documented rural remedy. The logic is that a sufficiently alarming lie will reset the nervous system so completely that the hiccup simply forgets to continue. Whether the patient ever forgave the deliverer of the fake news is not recorded.

Chapter IV · Contortion & Inversion Failed Yoga as Medical Practice

Another rich vein of hiccup folklore operates on the principle that the body, when sufficiently confused about which way is up, will stop hiccupping out of sheer disorientation. The drinking-upside-down method requires you to bend forward at the waist and sip from the far side of a glass, a maneuver that looks like a failed yoga pose and has roughly the same cure rate.

A more ambitious variant requires hanging your head off the edge of a bed or chair, dangling upside down in a posture that is equal parts faith and fluid dynamics, and drinking water while gravity actively works against you. This adds a meaningful risk of dignity loss and a moderate risk of water in the sinuses.

Chapter V · The Oral Tradition Things You Were Told to Swallow

Perhaps the most voluminous category of hiccup cures involves putting things in your mouth that your mouth did not ask for. Sugar, vinegar, peanut butter, stale bread, lemon juice, cinnamon oil on a sugar cube (from an 1834 Farmers’ Almanac, where they knew how to live): humanity has offered up its entire pantry in the hope that something in there might surprise the diaphragm into submission.

The sugar spoon is actually among the more defensible options: it stimulates the vagus nerve through the sweetness response. The peanut butter approach works on a different principle — the sheer thickness of the substance forces a series of deliberate swallows, which may interrupt the hiccup rhythm. Whether it works is unclear. Whether you look ridiculous eating peanut butter with a spoon as a medical intervention is not.

Nine grains of raw rice, swallowed one at a time. This is a real documented remedy. The genius of it is that it requires such sustained, deliberate concentration that you may simply forget you had hiccups. The dignity cost is not the swallowing — it’s the counting.

Chapter VI · Medical Science Where Dignity Goes to Die

We must, eventually, discuss The Procedure. In 2006, a paper in the Annals of Emergency Medicine documented cases in which persistent hiccups were cured by digital rectal massage — stimulation of the vagus nerve via the, ah, posterior approach. It worked. It is, by every measure of modern medicine, a legitimate treatment. It is also an experience that redefines your relationship with both your physician and the concept of the hiccup.

History’s medical canon has also suggested, with straight-faced professionalism: sneezing, vomiting, pulling the tongue, pressure on the eyeball, chloroform (briefly), sexual intercourse (one assumes this was self-reported as effective), and tickling the back of the throat with a feather. The feather approach is the gentlest of these, and yet it somehow still feels like the beginning of a situation you’d rather not explain.

One physician treating Charles Osborne reportedly placed him on a combination of carbon monoxide and oxygen. This theoretically worked. Unfortunately, it also would have killed him, a side effect considered “significant” by the medical establishment.

Conclusion What We Know, What We Don’t, and Why It Doesn’t Matter

Here is what science currently understands about hiccups: the diaphragm spasms involuntarily, the glottis snaps shut, and a sound is produced. Why? Unknown. What stops it? Also unknown, but probably vagus nerve stimulation, CO₂ balance, or something interrupting the neural loop. What definitely doesn’t stop it? Most of what we’ve tried.

And yet — across six millennia, in every culture, in every language, in the physician’s consulting room and the grandmother’s kitchen and the terrified face of a 10th-century Anglo-Saxon performing an elf exorcism — the human response to the hiccup has been magnificent in its absurdity and touching in its sincerity. We have tried everything. We have sacrificed dignity, shotgun shells, nine grains of rice, one key on a red string, and the therapeutic goodwill of our closest friends. We have bent upside down, held our breath, pressed our eyeballs, swallowed peanut butter, and, yes — in the name of medicine, with documented clinical outcomes — we have gone places that dignity cannot follow.

Charles Osborne hiccuped 430 million times and no one ever found the cure. His hiccups stopped on their own, one February morning in 1990, for no reason anyone has ever understood. He died the following year, at 97, finally at rest.

The next time you hiccup, hold your breath and sip some water. It’ll probably go away in three minutes. But if it doesn’t — and you find yourself reaching for the rice — count carefully. And know that you are in very good, very undignified company.