The World of Caffeine (20 page)

The University of Padua, when Padua was under Venetian rule, aspired to become for the academic world what Venice already was for the community of trade: the foremost international center, where the best of everything would be gathered together for exchange by and enrichment of all. By the time of Harvey’s tenure, it had succeeded, becoming one of the most exciting intellectual centers in Europe and winning special distinction in medical studies. While attending the University of Padua, Harvey encountered three things that were to change his life and the history of medicine forever. It was at Padua that Harvey learned the biological and medical texts of the ancients, including, of course, the highly revered works of Aristotle and Galen. It was also in Padua that Harvey fell under the influence of Fabricius, a man who instilled in him a recognition of the essential place of observation and experimentation in the study of biological systems. Finally, it was at Padua that Harvey first heard of coffee and developed a lifelong passion for the psychoactive and medicinal powers of caffeine.

Because the great trading city of Venice was nearby, it was natural that members of the faculty of the University of Padua should be among the leaders in writing books about scientific field trips abroad. Therefore it is no surprise that the second book published in Europe to mention coffee was written by Prospero Alpini (1553–1617), an eminent physician and professor of botany at Padua, after his return from a trip to the Orient. In this book,
The Plants of Egypt
(Venice, 1592), the author tells of the nature and popularity of the Islamic coffeehouse and lists some of the medicinal benefits coffee drinking confers. Whether Harvey encountered coffee in the works of Alpini, or whether it was, as some say, first served to him by Arab fellow students, we may never know. One thing is sure, however: When, after three years, Harvey returned to England, he brought with him the seeds of ideas that would change scientific thinking and other seeds as well, ones that, when properly prepared, would stimulate and augment the energy and clarity of thought, seeds that he was to use and recommend to others for this
purpose for the rest of his life, and the enjoyment of which he was to attempt to perpetuate among his colleagues after his death.
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Like Shakespeare, who died a week before Harvey’s first Lumleia Lecture before the College of Physicians in 1616, Harvey managed to attain immortal fame while leaving behind few discoverable traces of his personal life. We know he was married and childless and that his wife died ten years before he did. What little else is known of the man apart from the record of his work must be gleaned from the biographical sketch included in John Aubrey’s collection
Brief Lives,
the value of which may be compromised by the fact that Aubrey and Harvey did not become friends until Aubrey was twenty-five and Harvey was seventy-three. We find in Aubrey’s sketch the image of a man whom we can easily envision talking up his friends at intellectual coffee klatches.

Nuland offers his impression of the Harvey whom Aubrey depicts: “the image of an olive-complexioned, dark-eyed man of quite slight stature, filled with nervous energy of the high-output kind. But though his physical movements may have been fitful, his brain was full of purpose.”
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Surely this representation is consistent with a man who employs caffeine to keep his motor running in high gear. There may be more truth than fiction in an anecdote alleging that Harvey had discovered the secret of the circulation of the blood because his own heavy coffee drinking so stimulated his own system that he noticed his blood racing around his body.
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In any event, among Aubrey’s brief remarks is the following picture of Harvey as a man whom late coffee drinking might well have kept awake nights:

Aubrey testifies that Harvey and one of his brothers were inveterate coffee drinkers before the custom became popular in England.
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Indeed, as Harvey was seventy-three when the first coffeehouse opened for business in London, he must have done most if not all of his coffee drinking privately, from the stock that he had had specially imported from Italy.

He died in 1657, exclaiming to his solicitor and friend, if some undocumented accounts are to be believed, “This little fruit is the source of happiness and wit!” while running his thumbnail along the groove of a coffee bean. It was really caffeine that was the object of his praise and celebration. In his will he leaves his coffeepot and fifty-eight pounds of coffee beans, his entire stock, to his brothers in the Royal College of Physicians, directing that they celebrate the date of his death each month by drinking coffee until the supply he had provided became exhausted. The disbelief and controversy surrounding his theory, as expounded to the Royal College of Physicians (known then as the London College of Physicians), ultimately resolved into resounding acclaim, and the circulation of the blood was accepted into the arcana of great scientific discoveries. We leave the story of Harvey with the image in our minds of the members of the Royal College of Physicians toasting Harvey with the hot, stimulating brew and entertaining a few more ideas and pursuing a few more experiments than they might, without caffeine’s benefits, have otherwise undertaken.

John Ovington’s
Essay
and Other Rave Reviews of Tea

The English love of tea, which began in the seventeenth century, was recorded by a host of writers whose books can be read in rare book libraries today. Dr. William Chamberlayne (1619–89), an English physician and poet, in his
Treatise of Tea,
praises the drink for its ability to sustain mental efforts into the night:

In his elegantly styled
Essay upon the Nature and Qualities of Tea
(1699), John Ovington (fl. 1689–98), an English traveler and churchman, who, as the frontispiece declares, served as “Chaplain to His Majesty,” begins his book with a discussion of “the various Kinds of this foreign Leaf, and the Season wherein it should be gather’d, of the Method of making choice of the best, and the Means whereby it is preserv’d.” His fifth and final chapter, “The several Virtues for which it is fam’d,” encompassing half the volume, exposits tea’s medicinal effects. He claims that “Gout and Stone,” common disorders in Europe, are virtually unknown in China because of their constant use of tea. The remedial effects appear, he continues, “especially if it be drunk in such a Quantity, and at such convenient Times, when the Stomach is rather empty than over-charge’d.”
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Ovington’s claims for the medical benefits of tea went beyond the treatment of gout and kidney stones. Unknowingly referencing one of caffeine’s most characteristic effects, he wrote enthusiastically about tea’s ability to induce urination,
“fortify the Tone of the Bowels,” and also noted tea’s ability to aid digestion, “to strengthen a faint Appetite, and correct the nauseous Humours that offend the Stomach.” He considered these effects tokens of many additional benefits attendant upon the resulting purification of the body, especially for “weak and feeble Constitutions.”

Ovington reserves his highest praise for those mentally stimulating powers of tea we now know are caused by caffeine. He believed that not only could tea act as an antidote to alcohol, which “inflames the Blood, and disorders the Phantisms of the Brain,” but that it could actually promote imaginative and lively thoughts: “It nimbly, ascends into the Brain,…it actuates and quickens the drowsy Thoughts, adds a kind of new Soul to the Fancy, and gives fresh Vigor and Force to the wearied Invention.”

Thus it is with Ovington, in the penultimate year of the seventeenth century, that the notion of caffeine as a stimulant broadens. Previously, the caffeinated beverages had been credited with the power to sustain physical strength, as in the conquistador’s boasted that those who drank chocolate could march for a day without food, and the power to prolong wakefulness, as in the Sufi observation that coffee sustained their nocturnal devotions or the Taoist observation that tea sustained their prolonged meditations. To these stimulating powers Ovington adds the idea that tea can provoke “invention” or “fancy,” or, as we should say, “creativity,” and that it is therefore the natural liquor of the “sons of the Muse.” As to the identity of the “ingenious Persons” who, Ovington says, had personal benefit from tea’s power to stimulate creativity, we can only speculate, save for the certainty that he meant to include Edmund Waller (1606–87), whose poem,
“
Of Tea, commended by Her Majesty,” addressed to Catherine of Braganza (1638–1705), he presents in full. This poem praises tea as “the Muse’s friend,” which “does our Fancy aid.” This idea is well envisioned in Ruffio’s painting
Coffee Comes to the Aid of the Muse.

Although Ovington, like others before him, commends the ability of tea to forestall sleep and induce wakefulness, he regards this ability not so much as a result of the stimulation of the body, but as a consequence of tea’s power to fire the imagination by “animating the Faculties”:

His concluding cautionary remarks are surprisingly moderate and modern:

Mixed Notices for Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate

From the middle of the seventeenth century to the middle of the eighteenth century, a variety of extreme opinions about the three temperance beverages competed in England. Most English physicians, who, unlike their French counterparts of the time, were respected in their native land, advanced the view that coffee and tea had indispensable medicinal value.
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We get a quick look into the medical opinions of both countries about tea, coffee, and chocolate from
A Compleat History of
DRUGGS,
a compendious French
materia medica,
translated into English in 1712:

Of Tea

Coffee Comes to the Aid of the Muse,
a drawing from a painting by Ruffio. This drawing reminds us of the line from Waller, “Tea, the Muse’s friend,” and the expressions of many famous artists and scientists to the effect that the caffeinated beverages were important if not indispensable to their creative exertions. (W.H.Ukers,
All about Coffee
)