The word "septicemia" probably won't figure into the next Moët & Chandon ad campaign, but for my money, the passage that follows would be a sure-fire sell (as if I need any more reason to buy champagne). Forget Granny Clampett's medicinal moonshine, i.e., the Hollywood version of alcohol as folk curative, and raise a glass to this well-told true story from One Writer's Beginnings, the elegant memoir of a true grande dame of Southern lettres, Eurora Welty:"What had struck her was septicemia, in those days nearly always fatal. What my father did was to try champagne."
"I once wondered where he, who'd come not very long before from an Ohio farm, had ever heard of such a remedy, such a measure. Or perhaps as far as he was concerned he invented it, out of the strength of desperation. It would have been desperation augmented because champagne couldn't be bought in Jackson. But somehow he knew what to do about that too. He telephoned to Canton, forty miles north, to an Italian orchard grower, Mr. Trolio, told him the necessity, and asked, begged, that he put a bottle of his wine on Number 3, which was due in a few minutes to stop in Canton to 'take on water' (my father knew everything about train schedules). My father would be waiting to meet the train in Jackson. Mr. Trolio did--he sent the bottle in a bucket of ice and my father snatched it off the baggage car. He offered my mother a glass of chilled champagne and she drank it and kept it down. She was to live, after all."
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