The World of Caffeine (23 page)

France in the 1890s:
Treatise Du Caféisme Chronique

II rend la mémoire et l’imagination…

It is sometimes difficult to keep in mind, when reading passages of early medical texts about the ability of coffee and tea to maintain wakefulness, that the authors had never heard of caffeine and had no direct evidence that the same unknown agency was at work in both beverages. The change in practice, from referring to “coffee” to using the word “caffeine” and acknowledging its existence, occurred sometime around the middle of the nineteenth century. We know that it was still far from complete when Octave Guelliot (b. 1854) published his monograph
Du Caféisme Chronique,
or
On Chronic Coffeeism,
in Rheims in the 1890s. From the title of his essay, it is obvious that, at this time, the excessive use of coffee constituted an identifiable syndrome, and it is so regarded in this paper; but, though caffeine had been described more than seventy years earlier, it was still possible to write a fifty-page medical treatise dealing primarily with coffee and incidentally with tea as drugs without mentioning the word “caffeine” even once.
Du Caféisme
is a strange amalgam of Victorian science and a recapitulation of Pauli’s seventeenth-century hall of horrors. With respect to understanding the history of caffeine, it provides an excellent example of science in transition.

How persistent were the Paulian charges against the relatively innocent caffeinated drinks! In somewhat more modern medical terminology than Pauli’s, Guelliot blames them for causing sleeplessness, sleep-walking, dyspepsia, tremors, melancholy, pneumonia, loss of appetite, pains in the legs, loss of libido, red tongues, remarkably brilliant eyes, and dozens of other pathological conditions.

In Guelliot’s treatise, we encounter a list of other substance abuse problems that Guelliot compares with
caféisme: théisme,
alcholisme, absinthisme, cocainisme,
and
morphinisme.
It is then that we remember that the root of the word “caffeine,” which today designates a chemical compound found in coffee, tea, maté, guarana, cola nuts, and other plants, is the French word
“café,”
which simply means “coffee.” And during the nineteenth century the words “thein,” and even “matein” and “guaranine,” were still in use to refer to the identical drug as it occurred in tea, maté, or guarana. Guelliot ascribes to opium intoxication symptoms that he says are very similar to those of
caféisme,
including loss of appetite and wasting away and chills.

In the notes to his treatise, Guelliot gives us an amusing, literate review of the histories of coffee and tea, especially of their progress in Europe. He tells us that Bernard Le Bovier de Fontanelle (1657–1757) and Voltaire were both inveterate coffee addicts. In response to the common admonitions of his day that coffee was a poison and its use would shorten life, Fontanelle, who was to live to a hundred, remarked late in his life,
“Si le café est un poison, c’est un poison lent”
(If coffee is a poison, it is a slow poison).

This monograph, written at a time when doctors recognized the existence of caffeine and theine and many understood their common identity, and yet in which caffeine was still often overlooked in discussions of the syndromes of chronic, excessive use of coffee or tea, represents the end of an era. Within a few years following its publication, we encounter the rigorously scientific, double-blind studies of caffeine’s physical and mental effects by the Hollingworths at Columbia, after which the recognition of caffeine as the most important active agency in coffee and tea was finally complete.

To people alive today it may seem incredible that the classical and medieval worlds did not have any stimulant drug, and, even more incredible that they seem to have managed happily without one.
¹
Since the seventeenth century, however, Europeans have relied on caffeine to help them keep to their work schedules by waking them up when they are sleepy and keeping them going when they are tired, and they have done so to such an extent that it is difficult to imagine what modern life would be like without it.

It may be that some of the advantages of using caffeinated drinks became apparent only once society could no longer mark appointments by the sun and stars. During medieval times, schedules were lax, holidays many, and disorganization pervasive. Throughout this period in the West there was not a single accurate clock on the entire Continent.
²
The exactness of timepieces was so limited that a single-handed clock face, indicating the quarter hours, sufficiently answered to their precision. This remained true until the uniformity of pendulum motion was discovered by Galileo in 1583, during his sophomore year at the University of Padua. Over the next hundred years, it came into general use in Europe as the basis for the first accurate clockwork mechanism. By around 1660 the minute hand, representing a fifteenfold increase in accuracy, became common in England.
³
Larger-scale industrial and economic endeavors became possible only once the measurement of small units of time had become standardized and routine, allowing for coordinated efforts across time and space. This improvement in precision occurred in the same decades when caffeine use became general in Venice, Paris, Amsterdam, London, and across the Continent.
⁴
Its date corresponds well with the opening of the first coffeehouses in London and the beginning of the vigorous coffeehouse culture as a center of the trades, the sciences, and the literary arts.
⁵
Once this chronometric standardization occurred, the use of an analeptic became a virtual necessity to regulate the biological organism, allowing people to meet the demands of invariant scheduling. The only suitable analeptic, one easily available, well tolerated, safe, and effective, is caffeine. There is a sense, therefore, in which the combination of the clock and caffeine may have been essential to the development of modern civilization, and it may not be going too far to assert that the modern world, at least as we know it today, could neither have been envisioned nor built without this combination to make it possible.
⁶

It also may be that another advantage of the caffeinated drinks, that they did not contain alcohol, could only be appreciated by peoples who, having been troubled by intemperate drinking, were no longer able to afford the resulting impairments. During medieval times, most heavy work was done by people who had been drinking alcohol since breakfast and who continued to drink it throughout the working day. In a besotted Europe, the caffeinated beverages were heralded as the great agents of sobriety, which could free men from the intoxication and distress of alcoholic drinks. It is a challenge to the twentieth-century imagination to conceive how medieval man designed and built the great cathedrals during a period when beer for breakfast was standard fare. The tour guides conducting visitors through European or English cathedrals frequently point out a site near the ceiling where some hapless person, often the architect or chief engineer, slipped off a scaffold to his death. Considering how much alcohol was being consumed, it is easy to envision how this mischance could have been so often repeated.

Brian Harrison, writing of the temperance movement in Victorian England, ably sums up both aspects of the relation of modern work to caffeine:

Caffeine, therefore, in the vehicles of coffee and tea, fostered the productivity gains that a newly competitive environment demanded, and did so in two important ways. First, caffeine helped large numbers of people to coordinate their work
schedules by giving them the energy to start work at a given time and continue it as long as necessary and, in some cases, even increased the accuracy of their work. This meant that people could work longer hours and accomplish, proportionately, even more than they had before. Second, the caffeinated beverages, by displacing the heavy consumption of alcohol, markedly reduced one of the endemic impairments of medieval industry. Sober workers always produce more and better work than drunken ones.

In the sixteenth century, an an additional factor made the drinks in which caffeine was served desirable and perhaps indispensable, even apart from their value in conveying a stimulant.
⁸
Beginning at this time, a mini-ice age gradually overtook Europe, bringing with it famine, hard winters, and cold summers. The Swiss scholar H.J.Zumbühl searched drawings, paintings, and photographs in museums and private collections throughout the Continent, amassing more than three hundred visual representations of the Lower Grindelwald glacier between 1640 and 1900. When Zumbühl systematically dated the pictures and made suitable adjustments for each artist’s viewpoint, he was amazed to note these images proved the ice had been in overall advance since the start of that period, and in overall retreat since about 1850. Detailed histories of the Mont Blanc region of the Alps confirm the advance of the glacier, which apparently began around 1550.

Extensive seventeenth-century French accounts of the “impetuosity of a great horrible glacier” were confirmed in the early 1970s by climatologist and cultural historian E.Le Roy Ladurie. Some of the stories that survive tell a chilling tale of how, in 1690, poor peasants from Chamonix paid the travel expenses for the bishop of Geneva, in the hopes he would exorcise the juggernaut of ice from their farmlands and meadows. His prayers were apparently answered when the ice withdrew. Unfortunately, it resumed an inexorable return a few years later.
⁹

The chill deepened over the decades. Famine claimed many lives in Finland, Estonia, Norway, and Scotland in the winter of 1695, the coldest winter of a cold decade. In 1771, famine struck again, after a long sequence of snowy summers in central Europe, and the beginning of a rapid spurt forward by the Swiss glaciers.
¹⁰
Possible causes of the mini-ice age include the earth shifting on her axis, increasing sunspots that reduced the amount of solar heat, or exploding volcanic activity that spewed light-filtering dust into the atmosphere. Whatever brought on the chill, this long freeze may have prompted Europeans to resort to the caffeinated drinks for their value in staving of hunger and keeping warm and may well have been the initial impetus for the adoption of the caffeinated beverages and the spread of caffeine as the most popular drug on earth.

Coffee and tea have given rise to a great duality: two major, largely divergent streams in the cultural history of caffeine. Coffee has become associated with all things masculine and with the the artist, the nonconformist or political dissident, the bohemian, even the hobo, as well as the outdoorsman. Its use is often considered a vice, its consumption linked with frenetic physical and mental activity, intense conversation, and with other indulgences that threaten health and mental balance, such as tobacco, alcohol, and late nights of hard partying or excessive work. Tea, in contrast, is associated with the feminine and with the drawing room, quiet social interaction, spirituality, and tranquillity and is regarded as the drink of the elite, the meditative, the temperate, and the elderly. These differences between coffee and tea are easily seen by comparing the ancient, worldwide, socially inclusive, and rough and ready institution of the coffeehouse with the decorous traditions of the Japanese tea ceremony and the English afternoon tea. An acknowledgment of these differences must underlie the fact that, although coffee has been the subject of many bans and opposed by many temperance movements, tea has rarely, if ever, appeared on anyone’s list as a substance that ought to be put beyond the pale of law or morality.

The more it is pondered, the more paradoxical this duality within the culture of caffeine appears. After all, both coffee and tea are aromatic infusions of vegetable matter, served hot or cold in similar quantities; both are often mixed with cream or sugar; both are universally available in virtually any grocery or restaurant in civilized society; and both contain the identical psychoactive alkaloid stimulant, caffeine. It is true that coffee is generally brewed to a caffeine strength over twice that of a typical cup of tea, yet, because more than one cup of each beverage is commonly consumed, there is no doubt that you can get a full dose of caffeine from either one.

So the question remains: Why has the duality between the culture of coffee and the culture of tea become so universally and so sharply delineated? For example, why did tea become the center of a proper, conventionalized, intimate social gathering in both England and Japan, while coffee failed to do so anywhere? And again, why did coffee become the stimulant of gossip, business, and political and intellectual banter in medieval Turkey, in London in the seventeenth century, and in dozens of American cities at the end of the twentieth century, while tea failed to do so anywhere?

The Great Duality Between the Cultures of Coffee and Tea

We cannot answer this question definitively, but can only observe that these disparate traditions are visible early in the history and development of caffeine culture as realized in the spreading consumption of coffee and tea. The duality is consistent enough that divergent examples, such as the Bedouin coffee ceremonies and Arab concentrated tea swilling emerge as exceptions to a rule.
¹
Cola beverages and other carbonated soft drinks containing caffeine do not have a long enough history to be as elaborately differentiated as coffee and tea: They do have distinctive associations, however, such as youth, high-energy, America, pop culture, and “good, clean fun.”

Among all the nations, the two that best exemplify both this unlogical duality and the avid and widespread influence of coffee and tea on art, literature, architecture, politics, commerce, manners, and society are Japan and England. In Japan, the ancient discipline and enjoyment of teaism is a perfect embodiment of the tea aspect of caffeine; while the coffeehouse in twentieth-century Japan, a place of fast-paced conversational, social, and business interactions, is an instance of the coffee aspect. In England, the boisterous male melange of the early coffeehouses ideally exemplifies the coffee aspect, while the refined, feminized afternoon tea, arriving two centuries later, manifests the tea aspect. And finally, in both Japan and England, the old and the new abide together, so that coffee and tea are used in both traditional and contemporary ways. Thus, a presentation of the culture of caffeine in Japan and England offers a uniquely comprehensive view of caffeine’s dual and powerful agencies.