If you have a mind to eat something or to drink other liquors, there is commonly an open shop near it, where you sit down upon the ground or carpets and drink together. Among the rest they have a very good drink, by them called Chaube that is almost as black as ink, and very good in illness, chiefly that of the stomach; of this they drink in the morning early in open places before everybody, without any fear or regard, out of China cups, as hot as they can; they put it often to their lips but drink but little at a time, and let it go round as they sit.
In this same water they take a fruit called Bunnu which…have within them, two yellowish grains in two distinct cells, and besides, being they agree in their virtue, figure, looks, and name with the Bunchum of Avicenna, and Bunca of Rasis ad Almans [Rhazes] exactly; therefore I will take them to be the same, until I am better informed by the learned. This liquor is very common among them, wherefore there are a great many of them that sell it, and others that sell the berries, everywhere in their Batzars.7
In Dr. Edward Pocoke’s translation (Oxford, 1659) of Rauwolf’s The Nature of the Drink Kauhi, or Coffee, and the Berry of which It Is Made, Described by an Arabian Physician, we find a good account of what was understood about the bean and its medical value in terms of contemporary humoral theory:
Bun is a plant in the Yaman [Yemen], which is prepared in Adar, and groweth up and is gathered in Ab. It is about a cubit high, on a stalk about the thickness of one’s thumb. It flowers white, leaving a berry like a small nut, but that sometimes is broad like a bean; and when it is peeled, parteth in two. The best of it is that which is weighty and yellow; the worst, that which is black. It is hot in the first degree, dry in the second: it is usually reported to be cold and dry but it is not so; for it is bitter and whatsoever is bitter is hot. It may be that the scorce is hot, and the Bun it selfe either of equall temperature, or cold in the first degree.
That which makes for its coldnesse is its stiptickness. In summer it is by experience found to conduce to drying of rheumes, and flegmatcick coughes and distillations, and the opening of obstructions, and the provocation of urin. It is now known by the name of Kohwah. When it is dried and thoroughly boyled, it allayes the ebullition of the blood, is good against the small poxe and measles; the bloudy pimples; yet caught vertiginous headheach, and maketh lean much, occasioneth waking, and the Emrods, and asswageth lust, and sometimes breeds melancholly.
He that would drink it for liveliness sake, and to discusse slothfulnesse, and the other properties that we have mentioned, let him use much sweat meates with it, and oyle of pistaccioes, and butter. Some drink it with milk, but it is an error, and such as may bring in danger of the leprosy.8
The humoral terminology has not changed since Avicenna. And the uncertainty remains, as to a point that seems fairly fundamental, over whether coffee is, in terms of this theory, hot or cold in the first degree, although its dryness seems beyond dispute. The humoral hypothesis was rendered meaningless before it was discarded entirely. Medical experts after Rauwolf, in continuing their attempt to apply humoral analytical categories to coffee, eventually adopted the truistic formula that coffee somehow contained all the properties manifest in the fourfold scheme. In consequence, no possible experience with coffee could disprove the cogency of the humoral categories. Of course, this simply meant that nothing substantive was any longer being asserted, and, where nothing meaningful is being said, there can be nothing false either. Such looseness made it possible to attribute the widest range of benefits to coffee; for example, it could at once be said to dispel the gloom of the melancholy, mollify the choleric, and enliven the phlegmatic. Likewise, all manner of ills could be laid at its door.
Many new medical and ecclesiastical panegyrics on tea, coffee, and chocolate appeared, praising the drinks as panaceas. The first and fiercest opponent of their salutary view was Dr. Simon Pauli (1603–80), a German physician, who published Commentarius de Abusu Tabaci et Herbae Thee, etc. (Rostock, 1635), a medical tract with many dire admonitions about the detrimental effects of tea, coffee, chocolate, and, for good measure, tobacco. Both on account of his authority as physician to the king of Denmark and, later, through the translation of his work into English by one Dr. James as A Treatise on Tobacco, Tea, Coffee, and Chocolate (London, 1746), Pauli’s enmity toward the three caffeinated beverages enjoyed a widespread and enduring influence.
Pauli judged all the drinks to be equally injurious:
Hence we may reasonably infer, that as Chocolate agrees with Coffee and Tea,…so all these three exactly agree with each other, in producing Effeminacy and Impotence…. I therefore hope, that for the future, the Europeans will be wise, and reject Coffee, Chocolate, and Tea; since they are all either equally bad, or equally good: Nay, I hope to see People of all Ranks and Conditions, have as great an Aversion to them as the Mahometans and Turks, or rather their Emperors have to Tobacco, the Lovers of which as well as those who are idle, prodigal, barren, impotent, or effeminate, they will not suffer to live within their Territories.9
His book begins by proclaiming that the Chinese “are guilty of fulsome Exaggeration” when they assert that tea prolongs life, although he grants to tea a few genuine virtues in which we can see recognition of the effects of caffeine. “The first of which, according to Rhodius, is, that it alleviates Pains of the Head, and represses Vapors: The second, that it corroborates the Stomach: And, the third, that it expels the Stone and Gravel from the Kidneys.”10 In any case, there was no reason to risk tea’s hazards in the hope of gaining such benefits. Pauli believed that betony, a traditional European medicinal herb, bestowed them and more and without the attending risks.11
Pauli rehearses a long list of health problems consequent to the use of tea and asserts that chocolate is at least as bad and that coffee is worse. But, according to Pauli, drinking tea had special problems for Westerners, because as a result of the rigors of transportation and the change in climate, tea loses the virtues that “it may be admitted that it does posses in the Orient,” becoming dangerous indeed, so that, having deteriorated, “It hastens the death of those that drink it, especially if they have passed the age of forty years.”12 In the face of this menace, Pauli saw himself as a hero carrying forward a venerable tradition of public health education:
As Hippocrates spared no Pains to remove and root out the Athenian Plague, so I have used the utmost of my Endeavours to destroy the raging epidemical Madness of importing Tea into Europe from China.13
The Netherlands was the only major European nation in which there never arose a movement advocating caffeine temperance, or coffee and tea prohibition. The Dutch scientists and medical men, unlike many of their French and German counterparts, were more than tolerant of the new arrivals, and their enthusiastic or even fanatical promotion of the use of coffee, tea, and chocolate might well be called “caffeinomania.” For example, Jean Baptista van Helmont (1577–1644), a Flemish chemist, physiologist, and physician, taught his students that tea had the cleansing effects of leeches or laxatives and should be used in their place. Nikolas Dirx (1593–1674), another famous Dutch doctor, was also one of the earliest European physicians to promote the benefits of tea. In Observationes Medicae (Amsterdam, 1641), writing under the name “Dr. Tulpius,” he called attention to what are today some of the well-recognized effects of caffeine:
Nothing is comparable to this plant. Those who use it are for that reason, alone, exempt from all maladies and reach an extreme old age. Not only does it procure great vigor for their bodies, but it preserves them from gravel and gallstones, headaches, colds, ophthalmia, catarrh, asthma, sluggishness of the stomach and intestinal troubles. It has the additional merit of preventing sleep and facilitating vigils, which makes it a great help to persons desiring to spend their nights writing or meditating.14
Franz De le Boë (1614–72), or Franciscus Sylvius, a fellow Dutch physician, who helped establish modern chemistry as a science and championed Harvey’s theory of the circulation of the blood, influenced Dutch do
ctors such as Stephan Blankaart and many German physicians as well to recommend copious quantities of the “newly important novelties, tea and coffee, as panaceas for acidity and blood purifiers.”15 As a result of his efforts, several of the great German universities, including Jena and Wittenberg, promulgated these doctrines.
However, of all the physicians who wrote in praise of the medicinal value of coffee and tea at the close of the seventeenth century, yet another Dutchman, Dr. Cornelius Decker (1648–85), of Alkmaar, otherwise known as Dr. Cornelius Buntekuh (or Bontekoe), was their most distinguished and fervent advocate and a fitting adversary of Simon Pauli. An entrepreneur as well as a flamboyant medical theoretician, he is said to have opened the first coffeehouse in Hamburg in 1679.
Buntekuh did more than anyone else to promote the general use of both coffee and tea in Europe. In a book published in 1679, Buntekuh advised drinking a minimum of ten cups of tea daily, and recommended building up to fifty, one hundred, or two hundred cups, amounts he frequently consumed himself.16 Based on a record that the company paid him a handsome honorarium in gratitude for the boost his advocacy gave to tea sales, it is said that Buntekuh may have initially been hired by the Dutch East India Company to write in praise and defense of tea. This was perhaps the first grant of money in the West by a commercially interested party to a physician or scientist friendly to the use of a caffeinated beverage to write in its favor, an endowment reminiscent of Lu Yü’s commission from the Chinese tea merchants nearly a thousand years earlier. Of course, the provision of money by merchants to support publishable research friendly to caffeine continues to this day.
Frederick William (r. 1640–88) inherited his throne following the destruction of the Thirty Years’ War, when towns stood abandoned, Berlin was devastated, and productive industry was suspended. Because the ruler admired the Dutch people for their stalwart character, determination, and diligence, Frederick induced thousands to immigrate to help repopulate his desolate kingdom. He also mounted a campaign to lure foreign intellectuals to Germany, to help in working a miraculous revival for the nation. Partly in consequence of this effort, he became a man ahead of his time in respect to coffee and tea, when Dr. Buntekuh, then regarded as an eminent physician, became one of many to accept Frederick’s invitation to relocate from Holland to Germany. As a result of Buntekuh’s blandishments, Frederick started drinking coffee himself and imported his personal supply of beans from Buntekuh’s homeland.17
Buntekuh’s scientific goal, to improve the dietary habits of Europe, was greatly advanced by his new place in Frederick’s court. Because his father was an innkeeper under the sign of the “Bunte Kuh,” or the “brindled cow,” his neighbors dubbed him with the cognomen he later signed to his scientific monographs. After studying philosophy, with special attention to Descartes, Buntekuh moved to Amsterdam and then to Hamburg. Frederick William enticed him to come to Germany by seeing that he was offered an appointment at the University of Frankfurt-on-the-Oder. In his Medizinischen Elementarlehre and other books Buntekuh wrote extensively about the analeptic effects of coffee and tea, clearly reflecting his recognition of the pharmacological properties that we now attribute to caffeine.
Buntekuh taught his students that Harvey’s was the greatest scientific discovery in several hundred years.18 Like many other contemporary physicians, Buntekuh thought that any substance that enlivened or accelerated the circulation of the blood was bound to be beneficial. Because coffee and tea evidently promoted and stimulated this circulation, they boosted the vitality of the Cartesian living machine. As we shall see, Harvey himself was also one of the great seventeenth-century caffeine enthusiasts.
In the historical saga of caffeine, Buntekuh is also remembered for having published the earliest European depiction of the cacao tree. His engraving accurately shows how the tree bears its pods directly from the main branches, one of the plant’s more unusual properties. It also shows how a larger tree may be planted nearby, as is often done, to shade the young cacao plant.
Buntekuh’s death at thirty-eight did not add credibility to his treatise Traktat van het Excellentie Cruyt Thee (1679), on the extension of human life by the use of tea, coffee, and chocolate, for he certainly was a man who took his own medicine. However, we must add for completeness’ sake that he died not of ill health but by accident, falling down a darkened staircase while carrying books for the Great Elector, as Frederick was called in recognition of his miraculous revival of the nation. A doubt remains, however, if the chronic use of toxic doses of caffeine might not have created tremors, excitement, or even delirium that caused him to lose his footing. At the very least, we might assume that he was critically sleep deprived at the time of his fall.
Because of Buntekuh’s presence, coffee was brewed at the Berlin Court in the 1670s, although its circulation was limited to an aristocratic coterie. But despite this brief flirtation with it and the other caffeinated drinks, Germany was not yet ready for caffeine, and, after Buntekuh’s death, caffeine was not to become widely popular there for several decades.
Medical Disputes in Marseilles and the Rest of France
At least once, toward the end of the seventeenth century, the provinces overtook Paris in a matter of fashion. For while the popularity of coffee remained limited in that city by royal indifference and the lack of any regular commercial supply until 1692, in Marseilles, a port of entry, coffee had become readily available and prevalent more than twenty years before.
Around 1650, several Marseilles merchants, after spending time in the Near East, began bringing coffee home with them in small amounts. Within a few years, merchants and pharmacists formed a syndicate to institute commercial imports of coffee from Egypt, and their example was soon followed by their counterparts in Lyon. These imports allowed coffee use to become common in the countryside surrounding both towns. In 1671 a coffeehouse opened in Marseilles, the success of which prompted the creation of many others, all of which, we are told in contemporary accounts, were heavily patronized. At the same time, household coffee use became more common, so that, as Jean La Roque reports in Voyage de L’Arabie Heureuse (Paris, 1716), “In fine, the use of the beverage increased so amazingly that, as was inevitable, the physicians became alarmed, thinking it would not agree with the inhabitants of a country hot and extremely dry.”19
These concerns and the corresponding disputes over the salubrity of coffee were essentially those voiced in Mecca, Cairo, and Constantinople more than a hundred years before, and they were, as we have seen, also based on the humoral theory propounded by Avicenna and other Islamic physicians. Overall the French public leaned heavily in favor of the caffeinated beverages, while the French physicians leaned heavily against them. La Roque describes a late-seventeenth-century face-off between the caffeine users and the doctors during which “the lovers of coffee used the physicians very ill when they met together, and the physicians on their side threatened the coffee drinkers with all sorts of diseases.”20
One difference between these controversies in France and the Islamic disputes was the part played by the French vintners, who were not disposed to share their customers with coffee merchants and who therefore subsidized caffeine’s opponents in this war of letters. In 1679 Castillon and Fouqué, two physicians of the Faculty of Aix, rented the town hall and sent a freshman medical student, named “Colomb,” to argue a brief against coffee before the city magistrate and an audience of local physicians and laymen. In his thesis, entitled “Whether the Use of Coffee Is Harmful to the Inhabitants of Marseilles,” Colomb acknowledged that coffee was used in many nations, where it had often entirely displaced wine, while arguing that, nevertheless, it was in every way inferior to that more familiar beverage. With characteristic Gallic xenophobia, he then damned coffee as an unwholesome foreign introduction, brought to the attention of men by goats and camels. As to its health effects, he asserted that coffee had been accepted by European physicians on the strength of selfserving Arab testimonials disseminated to develop new mar
kets for their produce. Coffee, he continued, had no value as a cure for distempers and was in humoral terms hot, not cold as its proponents claimed, and that, because it consumed the blood, it caused impotence, emaciation, and palsy. Colomb concluded:
Some assure us that coffee is a cooling drink and for this reason they recommend us to drink it very hot…. The burned particles, which it contains in large quantities, have so violent an energy that, when they enter the blood, they attract the lymph and dry the kidneys. Furthermore, they are dangerous to the brain for, after having dried up the cerebro-spinal fluid and the convolutions, they open the pores of the body, with the result that the somniferous animal forces are overcome. In this way the ashes contained in coffee produce such obstinate wakefulness that the nervous juices are dried up;…the upshot being general exhaustion, paralysis, and impotence. Through the acidification of the blood, which has already assumed the condition of a river-bed at midsummer, all the parts of the body are deprived of their juices, and the whole frame becomes excessively lean.21
His references to “juices” designate the body’s fluids, the balance of which, according to humoral theory, determined a person’s health. Once again, it is easy tc see the actions attributable to caffeine among the effects Colomb describes, including what was then often called “desiccation,” or increased urination, and its power to overcome “somniferous animal forces” and induce “obstinate wakefulness.”
Colomb’s diatribe did not dissuade many caffeine users, for coffee had already insinuated itself into popular affections and was not to be easily displaced. In France, where doctors of medicine were lampooned in contemporary plays as pretentious pseudo-savants, their anticoffee blandishments won little regard from the public. Therefore, despite the reformatory admonitions of physicians such as Castillon and Fouqué, coffeehouses continued to increase in popularity, as did coffee drinking in the home, and the merchants imported green coffee from the East in ever increasing quantities to satisfy the demand.
The World of Caffeine Page 16
