Though Colomb’s exhortations and the admonitions of the physicians of Aix failed to impress the public at large, they did help to prejudice the views of the medical community for some time. Partly as a result of Colomb’s arguments, most French doctors toward the end of the seventeenth century advised against the use of coffee as a comestible, maintaining that it was a potent and potentially dangerous drug that should be taken by prescription only. Lurid stories about coffee poisoning abounded. When Jean Baptiste Colbert (1619–83), financier and statesman, died, it was whispered that his stomach had been corroded by coffee. According to another letter penned by Elizabeth Charlotte, duchess of Orléans, an autopsy revealed that the princess of Hanau-Birkenfeld had hundreds of stomach ulcers, each filled with coffee grounds, and it was concluded that she had died of coffee drinking.
Not every Gallic scientist was so easily persuaded of the evils of caffeine. Philippe Sylvestre Dufour (1622–87), an archaeologist, joined with Charles Spon (1609–84), a Lyon physician, scholar, and Latin poet, and Cassaigne, another local physician, to perform a chemical analysis of coffee. Based on this collaborative effort, Dufour wrote his famous work mentioned at the opening of this chapter, which was reissued in many editions and translations, but which is now only to be found in rare book rooms, Traitez Nouveaux & curieux Du Café, Du Thé et Du Chocolate (1685).22 This was the first book to attempt to derive the pharmacologic effects of coffee from its chemical constituents. Among its other benefits, Dufour asserted that coffee counteracted drunkenness and nausea and relieved menstrual disorders. He repeated other long-standing claims for the drink, including that it relieved kidney stones, gout, and scurvy, and also stated that it strengthened the heart and lungs and relieved migraine headaches. He noted with surprise that some people can sleep at bedtime even immediately after drinking coffee. His overall judgment was a favorable one: “Coffee banishes languor and anxiety, gives to those who drink it, a pleasing sensation of their own well-being and diffuses through their whole frame, a vivifying and delightful warmth.”23 (Dufour also wrote an earlier book about the preparation of the caffeinated beverages, The Manner of Making Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate as It Is Used by Most Parts of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, with Their Virtues [Lyon, 1671; London, 1685].)
Dr. Louis Lemery (1677–1743) published Traité des Aliments (Paris, 1702; translated by John Taylor and printed in London as A Treatise of Foods, 1704), in which he summarized what he saw as the beneficial and harmful effects of coffee. Among the good effects were: strengthening the stomach, speeding digestion, abating headaches, alleviating hangovers, stimulating the production of urine and flatulence and the onset of menses, and stimulating the memory and imagination. The bad effects included emaciation and loss of sexual appetite.24 In the English edition, while ascribing to chocolate most of the same pharmacological effects as coffee, he also credited it with allaying “the sharp Humours that fall upon the Lungs,” a clear reference to caffeine’s antiasthmatic properties, and with promoting “venery” as opposed to diminishing the erotic impulse.
Toward the close of the seventeenth century, Daniel Duncan (1649–1735), a Scottish physician on the faculty of Montpellier, wrote a polemic addressing all three known caffeinated beverages and throwing in brandy and distilled spirits for good measure. His book, published in France in 1703, attained considerable circulation in that country and was translated into English under the title Wholesome Advise against the Abuse of Hot Liquors, Particularly of Coffee, Chocolate, Tea, Brandy, and Strong-Waters. This 1706 London edition published by H.Rhodes was widely referenced as an authority throughout the eighteenth century. Dr. Duncan saw himself as a man of moderation and reason, one who fairly considered all sides of every question and eschewed extremes of all sorts. On the first page of his book he states, in what was an apparently unknowing recapitulation of a compelling neo-Platonic Augustinian theodicy, that any being, however base, is better than nothing. “There’s nothing absolutely good, but God…. Among Creatures there’s nothing absolutely Bad, for [that] they are the workmanship of that infinitely good being, communicates to each of them some degree of that goodness.”25 After four or five pages more in this vein, he continues:
Title page: Wholesome Advise against the Abuse of Hot Liquors, Particularly of Coffee, Chocolate, Tea, Brandy and Strong-Waters, with directions, To know what Constitutions they Suit, and when the Use of them may be Profitable or Hurtful, by Dr. Duncan of the Faculty of Montpelier, London, Printed for H.Rhodes at the Star, 1706. This book, by a Scottish physician who took a position on the medical faculty in France, warned against the dangers of excessive coffee, tea, and chocolate consumption. (Philadelphia College of Physicians)
That’s the design of this Treatise, and to make a particular Essay upon this General Maxim, by describing the Good and Bad Use of Hot Things, and especially of Coffee, Tea, Chocolate, and Brandy, of which abundance of Good has been said by some, and abundance of Ill by others.26
A garrulous moralist, Duncan saw in the pleasures of coffee, tea, and chocolate a dangerous snare. “Voluptuousness,” he explains, “creates in us an Aversion to good Things, because they are not pleasant; and an inclination to bad Things, because they please us.” He adds, “Both these things happen in the use of Coffee, Chocolate, and Tea.” Coffee’s bitterness is so pronounced that coffee at last becomes “agreeable …not so much by Custom, as by the mixture of Sugar…and since it became pleasant, it’s become pernicious by the abuse of it.” Calling them all “liquors,” Duncan pronounces a single verdict on all three caffeinated beverages, suggesting how strongly their common nature as vehicles of a drug was suspected and providing a vivid impression of how completely caffeine had conquered France by the turn of the eighteenth century:
The use or abuse of those Liquors has become almost universal. Towns, villages, and all sorts of people are in a manner over-flow’d by them. So that not to know them is reckoned barbarous. They are in all Societies, and to be found everywhere. Formerly none but Persons of Qualities or Estate had them, but now they are common to high and low, rich and poor, so that if they were poison, all mankind would be poison’d; and if they be good medicines, all men may reap advantage by them when they come to know the true use of them.
Duncan finally issues the balanced judgment he promised to deliver at the beginning of his book: that coffee, chocolate, and tea have good and bad effects, depending on who is using them and how much he is using, but that none of them is either a deadly toxin or a panacea. However, he also observes, too much of any caffeinated beverage is harmful to anyone, and even a small amount can be harmful to some people. Duncan concludes, as had so many before him, that many of coffee’s deleterious effects resulted from its diuretic actions, or “desiccative influence.”27 Although admitting that coffee could be beneficial for those “whose blood circulates sluggishly, who are of a damp and cold nature,” he asserted that the French did not suffer from this problem and so joined other French physicians in their opposition to its indiscriminate use in his adopted country.
The Early English Health Debates
Meanwhile, in England, despite republication of Duncan’s cautionary book there, caffeine continued to grow in popularity. And, although England had not been among the first Western nations to become alert to coffee, none took to the drink quite so avidly; in consequence, from 1680 to 1730, Londoners consumed more coffee than the inhabitants of any other city in the world.
What Goes Around Comes Around: Harvey Puts Caffeine into Circulation
The caffeine in coffee stimulated and sustained the investigations of the early members of the Royal Society, and in this way helped Robert Boyle create the science of chemistry and make possible caffeine’s discovery. Another remarkable tale of caffeine and the history of science depicts a man fifty years Boyle’s senior, William Harvey (1578–1657), physician and professor of anatomy, the greatest medical researcher and theoretician of his century, and a true pioneer of caffeine use in England.
Harv
ey, who discovered and demonstrated the circulation of the blood and is acknowledged, with Vesalius, as one of the two primary founders of modern scientific medicine, was also one of the first Europeans who is known to have taken caffeine regularly. He drank coffee for more than fifty years before coffeehouses came to London, at a time when he was forced to import his own supply of beans, the habit and the trade connections both having been acquired during his student days in Padua.
Harvey was born in Folkestone, Kent, the oldest of nine scions of a wealthy international trader. Five of his six brothers, following in their father’s footsteps, became “Turkey merchants,” as Englishmen called those who traded with the Eastern nations. Harvey’s singular academic bent was recognized early, and when he was ten years old he was enrolled in Kings School, where he was rigorously drilled in the Latin and Greek that was to give him access to the intellectual inheritance of the Classical world. At sixteen, he matriculated at Caius College at Cambridge, a school popular, then as now, among students interested in becoming physicians. (It had been named for Dr. John Caius, who had shared an apartment with Vesalius when both were students in Padua.) Harvey received his B.A. in 1597 and two years later embarked to study medicine in Italy. In 1602 he was granted his doctoral diploma from Padua. Thereafter, he returned to London, where, over the years, his upscale medical practice included James I, Charles I, and Lord Chancellor Bacon. Here he engaged in the methodical and creative investigations that led to the formulation of his history-making theory of the circulation of the blood.
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.28
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.”29
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.30 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:
He was hott-headed, and his thoughts working would many time keepe him from sleepinge; he told me that then his way was to rise out of his Bed and walke about his Chamber in his Shirt till he was pretty coole, i.e. till he had began to have a horror [chill], and then returne to bed, and sleepe very comfortably.
Aubrey testifies that Harvey and one of his brothers were inveterate coffee drinkers before the custom became popular in England.31 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:
When I have been compell’d to sit up all Night about some extraordinary Business, I needed to do no more than to take some of this Tea, when I perceiv’d my self beginning to sleep, and I could easily watch all Night without winking; and in the Morning I was as fresh as if I had slept my ordinary time; this I could do once a week without any trouble.32
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.” 33
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.”
The World of Caffeine Page 17