The World of Caffeine (21 page)
Read The World of Caffeine Online
Authors: Bonnie K. Bealer Bennett Alan Weinberg
Of Coffee
Caffe, Coffe, Coffi, Buna, Bon, Ban, or Elkaire…Coffee is used for little or nothing I know of, but to make a Liquor with Water and Sugar, which is more or less esteem’d, by different Nations....
It is an excellent drying Quality, comforts the Brain and dries up Crudities in the Stomach: Some Author says, it cures Consumptions, Rickets, and Swooning Fits; it helps Digestion, eases Pains of the Head, rarefies the Blood, supresses Vapours, gives Life and Gaiety to the Spirits, hinders Sleepiness after Vituals, provokes Urine and the Courses, and contracts the Bowels; it is an excellent Dryer, fit for most Bodies, and most Constitutions, but that of young Girls, subject to the Green-Sickness; and likewise is prevalent in such as are apt to have running Humours, sores, or King’s Evil upon them: It prevents Abortion, and confirms the Tone of the parts drunk after eating; but with this Observation, that this Liquor be always made fresh; for if it stands but two or three Hours, it will be pall’d and grow naught.
38
Of the Cacao, or Chocolate-Nut
This Fruit is cooling, as may easily be discern’d by their cold nitrous Taste. They open Obstructions, restore in deep Consumptions, stimulate to venery causing Procreation and Conception, facilitate Delivery, preserve Health, help Digestion, make People inclinable to feed, ease Coughs of the Lungs, Gripings of the Bowels, and Fluxes thereof, cause a sweet Breath, and assist in a Difficulty of making Urine. The chief Use of them is in Chocolate, which is so well known there needs no longer discourse about it.
39
Thomas Gage (1597–1656), an English missionary, traveler, and travel writer, who lived for a while in South America and wrote a book about the West Indies (referenced in
chapter 3
), recommends that his European readers take chocolate cold for health reasons, writing that this is the way the Indians do and “thus certainly it doth no hurt.” Gage believed that something about living in America weakened the stomach, stating that “stomachs are more apt to faint than here.” His account of his own consumption of chocolate has an addict’s characteristically insistent enthusiasm:
For myself I must say, I used it twelve years constantly, drinking one cup in the morning, another yet before dinner, between nine or ten of the clock; another within an hour or two after dinner, and another between four and five in the afternoon; and when I was proposed to set up late to study, I would take another cup about seven or eight at night, which would keep me waking till about midnight. And if by chance I did neglect any of these accustomed houres, I presently found my stomach fainty. And with this custome, I lived twelve years in those parts healthy, without any obstructions, or oppilations, not knowing what either ague or fever was.
40
We note that he specifies two among what today are recognized as the major effects of caffeine usage: forestalling sleep and a physical dependence that can cause an upset stomach if a dose is skipped.
Other observations about of tea’s pharmacological effects are found in an anonymous slim volume, published in London in 1722,
Essay on the Nature, Use, and Abuse of Tea: In a letter to a lady: with an account of its mechanical operation.
The author states that tea is to be regarded primarily as a drug, one that has medicinal value when prescribed properly by a physician. The book compares tea’s destructive effects with opium’s and warns:
Among many other Novelties in our Diet, there is one which seems particularly to be the Cause of the
Hypochondriack
Disorders
[pains and discomforts beneath the breast bone and melancholy]; and is generally known by the Name of
Thea
or
Tea.
It is a Drug, which has of late Years very much insinuated itself, as well into our Diet, as Regales and Entertainments, tho’ its Operation is not less destructive to the Animal Oeconomy, than
Opium,
or some other Drugs, which we have at present learn’d to avoid with more Caution. That this Drug is useful in Physick, is what I can by no means deny: But as a Medicine, makes it very hurtful as a Diet. And it may be said of all Bodies whatever, which are useful as Medicines, that they are Poisons as a Diet.
41
It is reported in Hawesworth’s
Voyages
that Commodore John Byron (1723–86), a British admiral, found cacao growing abundantly on King George’s Island in the South Seas. Henry Phillips, in
The Companion for the Orchard: An Historical and
Botan-ical Account of Fruits Known in Great Britain
(1831), reports that Byron’s claims for cacao’s pharmacological benefits were expansive:
42
The oil of the cacao-nut is the hottest of any known, and is used to recover cold, weak, and paralytic limbs. The Mexicans are said to eat the nuts raw, to assuage pains in the bowels.
43
With the emergence of modern medical theory and practice in the eighteenth century, two-thousand-year-old humoral theory, having already suffered punishing blows by Vesalius and Harvey in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, came to a lingering and belated end. During this transitional period there appeared a parade of curious, now mostly outmoded ideas about what caffeine does, and how it does what it does, in the human body.
Dr. Simon André Tissot
Fifty years after the death of Cornelius Buntekuh and fifty years before Runge discovered caffeine, elements of humoral theory were still prominent in European medicine. Dr. Simon André Tissot (1728–97), a Swiss-French physician and medical writer, writing at a time by which coffee had come into general use even in Germany, accepted coffee’s place in the
materia
medica
but expressed serious objections to its widespread consumption as part of an everyday diet. In his book
Von der
Gesundheit der Geleharten,
or
The Health of Scholars
(Leipzig, 1769), Tissot argued that Buntekuh, in promoting coffee and
tea, had “corrupted the whole of northern Europe.”
44
He asserted that accelerating the circulation of the blood, as coffee would admittedly do, had no value in curing illness and, in fact, will do positive harm:
It is a foolish belief of many sick persons that their ailments are due to an excessive thickness of the blood. Owing to this fallacy, they drink the harmful beverage coffee. The coffee-pots and tea-pots that I find upon their tables remind me of Pandora’s box, out of which all evils came…
The repeated stimulation of the fibers of the stomach weakens them in the end; … the nerves are stimulated, and become unduly sensitive; the energies are dissipated.
45
In this passage Tissot expresses his views about the consequences of coffee’s “desiccative” effects. Both coffee’s defenders and detractors agreed that the beverage had an important relationship to the humoral fluid, phlegm, or mucus, which it dried up, whether to good or bad effect, depending on the interpretation of the writer. It was to this effect that Benjamin Moseley, an English physician and medical writer, referred when he wrote, “coffee, which through its warmth and effectiveness, thins the mucous moistures, and improves the circulation of the blood.”
46
It was likewise of these desiccative effects that Denis Diderot (1713–1784), in his
Encyclopédie,
was speaking when he praised coffee’s effect on “heavy-bodied, stout, and strongly phlegm-congested persons,” while advising that it proved deleterious to the “thin and bilious.”
47
In a chastening response to those who affected to find coffee indispensable, Tissot pointed out that the great ancient writers, from Homer onward, wrote their great books without its benefit.
Benjamin Moseley, M.D. (1742–1819),
in A Treatise Concerning the Properties and Effects of Coffee
(London, 1785), presents a comprehensive study of what was known about the origins and health effects of coffee in his time, including a particularly interesting critique of prior medical writers such as Simon Pauli. Moseley sees himself as going beyond mere anecdote and basing his conclusions on observation and analysis. Like Thucydides, he did not have a similarly high opinion of the methods of his predecessors:
Among the furious enemies…of Coffee was SIMON PAULLI of Rostock, afterwards physician to the King of Denmark… PAULLI founded his prejudice against coffee, as he had his prejudices against Tea, Chocolate, and Sugar— not on experience, but on anecdotes, that had been picked up by hasty travellers, which had no other foundation than absurd report and conjecture…its supposed effects, on Sultan MAHOMET CASNIN, a King of Persia; who it is said, from an excessive fondness of Coffee, had sotted away the vigour of his constitution. But chemistry and experience have brought the subject into light, and Paulli’s baseless fabric has vanished.
Moseley continues by lampooning the arbitrary and contradictory humoral classifications into which coffee’s effects had been traditionally assigned by various medical writers, demonstrating the shift away from the ancient order in medicine that was starting to occur:
Many have been the dogmas concerning Coffee: some Authors allege that it is dry, and therefore good for the gross and phlegmatic, but hurtful to lean people; some contend that it is cold, and therefore good for sanguine, bilious, and hot constitutions; others that it is hot, and therefore bad for the sanguine and bilious, but good for cold constitutions. Some assure us that it acts only as a sedative; others that it acts only as a stimulant.
48
Moseley offers one of the last efforts to present a scientific analysis of coffee’s active constituents before the discovery of caffeine by Runge less than thirty-five years later. “The chemical analysis of Coffee, evinces that it posses a great portion of mildly bitter and light astringent gummois and resinous extract; a considerable quantity of oil; a fixed salt; and a volatile salt. —These are its medicinal constituent principles.” Although his chemical analysis is fanciful, Moseley rightly recognized 3 the importance of good roasting technique, freshness, and proper storage for preparing a desirable beverage:
The roasting of the berry to the proper degree, requires great nicety.... If it is underdone, its virtues will not be imparted; and in use, it will load and oppress the stomach:—If it is over-done, it will yield a flat, burnt, and bitter taste; its virtues will be destroyed; and in use, it will heat the body, and act as an astringent.
The closer it is confined at the time of roasting, and till used, the better will its volatile pungency, flavour, and [medicinal] virtues be preserved.
49
Moseley continues the tradition of exaggeration that had already become well established among both proponents and opponents of the caffeinated beverages, attributing a remarkable variety of medicinal benefits to coffee. However, in his judgment, the uses of coffee as a medicine fall into two broad categories. The first is alleviating “disorders of the head,” including headaches, of which he says, “There are but few people who are not informed of its utility.” The second includes its actions as a stimulant and cleansing agent or purgative, its “detergent properties…used in all obstructions of the viscera; it assists the secretions; powerfully promotes the menses, and mitigates the pains attendant on the sparing discharge of that evacuation.” These opinions, obviously reflecting experience with some of caffeine’s physiological effects, are exposited at length in his book.
Expressing a theory that has been confirmed in the twentieth century, Moseley spells out some of the therapeutic benefits of the caffeine in coffee for respiratory problems, a benefit which had been known, apparently, at least as early as the first decade of the eighteenth century:
50
A dish of strong Coffee without milk or sugar, taken frequently in the paroxysm of an asthma, abates the fit; and I have often known it to remove the fit entirely. Sir JOHN FLOYER [(1639–1734), physician and medical writer], who had been afflicted with the asthma from the seventeenth year of his age until he was upwards of fourscore, found no remedy in all his elaborate researches, until the latter part of his life, when he obtained it by Coffee.
In Moseley’s time, opium, that “inestimable medicine,” which had the ability to “relieve corporal pain by tranquility, and mental affliction by sleep…and whose excellence no human praise can reach,” was among the most powerful agents in the pharmacopoeia, and its active constituent agents and derivatives, such as morphine and heroin, remain among the most powerful drugs available today. Sovereign against pain, opium, especially when taken to excess, had a variety of side effects that limited its safety. In Moseley’s opinion, among coffee’s valuable qualities was its unique ability to counteract or reduce opium’s detrimental side effects; they are, he writes, “only remediable by Coffee.” Moseley thought that coffee was the specific antidote to opium’s hypnotic effects that had been sought after in vain from “the time of King MITHRADATES down to the days of Doctor JONES.” He also believed that the “heaviness, giddiness, sickness, and nervous affections, which attack the patient in the morning, who has taken an opiate at night, are agreeably removed by a cup or two of strong Coffee.” In his extensive discussion of this ability, it is evident that Moseley is referring to pharmacological actions that we today ascribe to caffeine:
The general opinion is erroneous, though of long standing, that the Turks used Coffee, exclusive of culinary purposes, only against the sleepy effects of Opium. The Turks, as well as the Persians and Indians, take Opium as a cordial, to invigorate them for the temporary enjoyment of amorous pleasures; and to enable them to support fatigue and to stimulate their nerves to the exertions of courage and enterprize. But when the desired effects of this cordial are over, langour, lassitude, and ejection of spirits succeed.—It is for these indispositions, that Coffee is so medicinally necessary to the Turks, and that they use it as their only remedy.
51