“Things are bad! Things are very bad: I have it, the filth, the Nausea,” Antoine Roquentin, the dyspeptic protagonist of Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel, Nausea, writes in his diary. “And this time it is new: it caught me in a café,” he continues, “I dropped to a seat, I no longer knew where I was; I saw the colours spin slowly around me, I wanted to vomit. And since that time, the Nausea has not left me, it holds me.” Has anyone ever needed ginger, the nausea remedy I’m going to tell you about, more than Antoine Roquentin? I mean, aside from pretty much every person in America these past four years.

Let me explain. Roquentin, the French philosopher’s alter ego, is a young writer at work on a biography of a minor eighteenth-century French diplomat, the Marquis de Rollebon. He’s also the proverbial man at loose ends: ambling around, loafing in cafés, hate-watching strangers while contending with bouts of existential malaise he’s named “the Nausea.” Meanwhile, in his diary, which is also the form of the novel, he chronicles every minor emotional blip and bodily sensation of his banal, trifling, and — in both his view and Sartre’s — pointless existence. 

He is sick of his biographical subject (“M. de Rollebon bores me to tears”), which he is stuck working on from the bleak seaside town of Bouville (the name translates, phonetically, to “Mudville”), where most of the archival documents he needs are held in the municipal library. Day to day, he encounters only a library dweller he’s nicknamed “the Self-Taught Man” — an autodidact reading through the stacks alphabetically and indiscriminately — and the proprietress of a local bar, with whom he has uninspiring dalliances. He is repulsed by other people (“This fellow with the moustache has enormous nostrils that could pump air for a whole family and that eat up half his face…”), especially their bovine tendency to find refuge in the herd: “All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other. In Heaven’s name, why is it so important to think the same things all together.” But he also hates every other object and phenomenon he encounters. Of a beam of light on his coat sleeves, he writes: “I cannot describe how much it disgusts me.” 

Nausea, widely regarded as Sartre’s fictional masterwork, popularized his embryonic ideas of existentialism as dramatized by his neurotic diarist-protagonist. Sartre believed that “existence precedes essence” — i.e., that our lives are not preordained, or bestowed with any meaning by God. Instead, we have ultimate freedom and the responsibility to define ourselves — 

to create our “essence” — by the choices we make. This is what sets us apart from objects and plants and animals, whose dumb inertness we frankly sometimes envy. When we fail to act, paralyzed by our own vast and terrifying freedom, as Roquentin is for most of the book, we are no different from the unfree objects that surround us. “I existed like a stone, a plant, a microbe,” Roquentin writes. The dizzying imprisonment of freedom, the nightmarish contingency of being, the ever-looming possibility of meaninglessness: It’s all enough to make one queasy.

I have been thinking about Nausea, the book and the sensation, for months now. Sartre published the novel in 1938, on the eve of World War II, during which he would be drafted, captured as a prisoner of war, and, upon his release, join the French Resistance. Nausea expresses the anxieties of that era and anticipates, metaphorically if not literally, the global despair and subsequent modern ills that were to come. “[I]t spreads at the bottom of the viscous puddle, at the bottom of our time — the time of purple suspenders and broken chair seats,” Roquentin writes of his Nausea, “[I]t is made of wide, soft instants, spreading at the edge, like an oil stain.” But what surprised me, as I reread the book, is how relevant it is to the strange, unsettling — and, yes, nauseating times — in which we have been living.

Like hiccups, or itching, nausea is a common phenomenon that remains a mystery — doctors call it “the neglected symptom.” It’s often defined as “an unpleasant painless subjective feeling that one will imminently vomit.” While nausea is certainly among the most unpleasant feelings one can experience, anyone prone to the pathology will disabuse you of the notion that it’s painless. Being nauseated is like sloshing around in a noxious sea of sensations, where everything is overwhelming and far too intense: too bright, vivid, fragrant, loud, annoying. And of course, vomiting is not always imminent, even though one wishes it were, since nausea tends to be more enervating, not to mention more drawn out, than just throwing up already. 

While the causes of nausea are myriad (antibiotics, anesthesia, chemotherapy, migraine, Ménière’s disease, motion sickness, gastroenteritis, depression), the mechanisms underlying the sensation are complex and poorly understood, involving the central nervous, autonomic nervous, digestive, and endocrine systems, as well as one’s psychological state. What Sartre gets right is that nausea is both an enfeebling physical condition and a gnawing spiritual one that leaves you unable to do, or even think about, anything else.

  By this point, you’re surely screaming, Get to the remedy! But I had to make you suffer a little, so that you would understand the life-sapping significance of this forsaken symptom, especially those of you, like my husband, who haven’t really experienced it. (He claims he’s only been nauseated three times in his life.) I want you to appreciate this affliction’s protracted ghastly horror, to know what it’s like to feel as though you’re seasick on a ship deck and still have to go about your business. If you’re prone to nausea, like I am — I’ve gotten it from beer, the birth control pill, those rotating high-rise restaurants, and once from a Mother’s Day “cruise” on Lake Michigan that never left the dock — then you’ve likely figured out a few palliatives. 

There are various medications that treat nausea, depending on its cause — cannabinoids, corticosteroids, benzos, and serotonin-receptor antagonists like Zofran can all help. But pharmaceuticals, as anyone reading this column knows, have their drawbacks. You can also try carbs; whenever I went to a keg party in high school, I always carried a sleeve of saltines or a couple of dinner rolls in my purse. And I love a sugary, real Coke, especially when I’m truly ill. Acupuncture works, too; as does hypnosis, or so I’m told. But those treatments can be pricey and involve another person. 

The healthiest, cheapest, least complicated, and all-around best option I’ve found to ameliorate nausea — with essentially no side effects — is ginger: that knotty, spicy, beige-colored “root.” I found ginger in my early twenties, around the time I first read Sartre’s novel. The two were not unrelated. I’d contracted a parasite infection at a writers’ conference in Belize — the catastrophic health event that started my lifelong natural medicine adventure — and was suffering from chronic, debilitating nausea. I had a roommate at the time, an eccentric but kind man with unusual dietary habits; he had a theory that ginger was one of the “five essential essences” (the others, as I recall, were chocolate, coffee, coconut, and almond), and that we should consume it regularly. He’d buy crystallized ginger in bulk, then put it in a colander and shake the coarse sugar off it to make it healthier — I’ll forever remember the gravelly sound it made. One day, I tried a lump of his denuded ginger candy and the sickening feeling in my upper gut instantly abated. I was a convert. Anytime I found myself surfing the waves of nausea, I’d pop a piece. 

Ginger is a rhizome, I’d later learn, not a root: an underground stem that grows horizontally and sprouts shoots and actual roots from various nodes. Its Latin name, Zingiber officinale, is thought to originate from the Greek zingiberis, and that from the Sanskrit śṛṅgavera, meaning “shaped like a deer’s antlers” or “deer horn” — a reference to its appearance, which always reminds me of a gnarled human finger. While ginger’s exact place of origin is difficult to pin down, it’s generally considered a native of Southeast Asia and, these days, is grown in tropical and subtropical climates. It’s what’s called a cultigen, in that it has no identifiable wild ancestor, and exists only as a cultivated plant.

For at least 3,000 years, ginger has been used as both a culinary spice and a medicinal tonic. In Ayurveda, the ancient Indian healing system, and in traditional Chinese medicine, it has long been an esteemed therapeutic plant thought to warm up the “digestive fire” and used to treat a wide array of ailments: from colds to rheumatism to toothaches to stomachaches. In the Analects, where the first written mention of ginger occurs, Confucius — the fifth-century BCE Chinese philosopher who was also something of a foodie — is said to have eaten ginger with every meal: “Eat ginger but in moderation so as not to increase the internal heat of the body,” the text reads. Ginger is sharp, pungent, powerful, as my husband learned one night when he decided to pour a can of powdered ginger in his bath and flew out of it as though he’d set himself aflame.

Along with cinnamon, nutmeg, pepper, and cloves, ginger found its way to ancient Greece and Rome via Arab spice traders; the Romans then introduced it to Northern Europe. The Greek physician Dioscorides, who was also a military surgeon in the Roman army, mentions ginger in his five-volume pharmacopeia, De Materia Medica (50-70 CE), calling it “a private plant growing plentifully in primitive Arabia” that is “used for many purposes,” among them, “boiling and mixing it in oil for drinking, and with boiled meats.” In ancient Rome, the wealthy elites were known to hold decadent banquets characterized by their culinary extravagance, which is perhaps also why Dioscorides says the roots were “warming and digestive, soften the intestines gently, and are good for the stomach.” If the vomitorium weren’t a historical myth, ginger would likely have spared at least a few gluttonous Romans a trip there.

Even after the fall of the Roman Empire, ginger remained a prized commodity in Europe. It was so highly valued during medieval times — used to flavor beer; in the rich, piquant sauces that accompanied roast meats; as a medicinal herb — that a pound of the spice cost as much as a sheep. In the Elizabethan era, gingerbread, described by the sixteenth-century English lexicographer John Baret as “a kinde of cake or paste made to comfort the stomacke,” was eaten at the end of a meal for the same straightforward reason ginger had been consumed for centuries: to smooth the bumpy process of digestion. Queen Elizabeth even kept a royal gingerbread maker in her court. In a cheeky act of diplomacy, she once ordered biscuits made in the shape of visiting foreign dignitaries — with this, she is said to have invented the gingerbread man.

By the early seventeenth century, the once-exotic spice began appearing in middle-class households. In The English Huswife, a 1615 domestic manual, the author Gervase Markham mentions ginger as an ingredient in puddings, leg of mutton, roast venison, and gingerbread, and also discusses it medicinally, as “a preservative against the pestilence” and a remedy “for the stopping of the womb.” Spices like ginger and cinnamon, warming herbs that heat up the body, were frequently used for female troubles like menstrual irregularity, infertility, or frigidity. Such indelicate associations stoked a great deal of anxiety among temperance-loving Protestants, who, as Taylor Parrish has written, viewed spices “as foreign and as hedonistic indulgences” and tried to discourage their use. Still, gingerbread remained a popular treat, especially at fairs and festive occasions, for which it was molded into elaborate shapes, like monarchs or animals. European settlers eventually brought ginger to America, where they replaced sugar with the less expensive molasses. American Cookery (1796) by Amelia Simmons, the first cookbook written by an American to be published in the United States, included no fewer than seven gingerbread recipes.

Nowadays, ginger is ubiquitous, consumed in ginger snaps and ginger ale (which, in its big corporate-brand form, contains less than two percent “ginger extract”), but also in Thai, Chinese, Indian, and Japanese cuisines. Rare is the American who has not tried, say, the fleshy, pink pickled ginger that accompanies sushi. But I’m interested in ginger’s therapeutic properties, and the fact that recent scientific studies have corroborated what centuries of folk-medicine have shown — namely that ginger, with its dozens of bioactive compounds, is effective against nearly every infectious agent and deleterious condition a human body can encounter or toss out. It’s anti-inflammatory, antifungal, antimicrobial, antidiabetic, antispasmodic, antihypertensive, anti-hyperlipidemic (cholesterol-reducing), anti-tumor, plus an analgesic. There’s more. 

Throughout history, ginger has most commonly been deployed as an anti-nausea agent, since it has multiple salutary effects on the digestive system. It’s a carminative, meaning it breaks up gas (or “fractures the flatulence,” as one AI-translated study put it); it also stimulates the production of saliva and accelerates “gastric emptying.” There are numerous studies showing it effectively eases nausea and vomiting from chemotherapy, pregnancy, surgery, and motion sickness. In a 1988 double-blind randomized placebo trial, one gram of powdered ginger given to 80 naval cadets “unaccustomed to sailing in heavy seas” was found to reduce “the tendency to vomiting and cold sweating” better than a placebo. A 2002 study of 26 pregnant women in their first trimester who were given one tablespoon of ginger syrup four times daily found that most experienced measurable improvement in the severity and duration of their morning sickness. 

I’m convinced that ginger works partly by fighting fire with fire, by cutting through the cacophony of nausea, the barrage of sensations, and bringing them into proportion. It modulates the soundboard. And yet it doesn’t land in the stomach like a hot pepper; instead, ginger suffuses the body, warming it at an almost cellular level. Finally, whereas nausea renders you passive — you just want to lie down and do absolutely nothing — ginger gives you the heat, the verve, to rally your forces. I am never without a collection of chewable ginger candies in my purse, and I genuinely believe that a cup of ginger tea — grate some ginger and pour hot water over it — solves most ills. 

Nausea in the Sartrean sense has been plaguing me, and much of the country, for four years now. The world has often felt random, godless, meaningless. The powers that be do not treat us as conscious, free beings, but rather as objects — the playthings of Big Pharma, Big Tech, and legacy media. Somewhere during the pandemic our sense of time became smudgy and indistinct, while familiar places changed beyond recognition. It’s easy to feel a profound sense of alienation: How strange to enter a drugstore and be told that garbage bags are now locked behind glass; how strange that restaurant food no longer tastes good and that incandescent light bulbs are banned; how strange that so many people seem to be carrying on dully unaware, zombified by denial.

Don’t despair. By the time you read this, our long national bout of nausea may finally, gloriously, be over. But for safety’s sake, grate yourself some fresh ginger, as I just have, and make a cup of tea.