The World of Caffeine (20 page)
Read The World of Caffeine Online
Authors: Bonnie K. Bealer Bennett Alan Weinberg
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:
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.
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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:
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.
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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”:
So that a few Cups of this excellent Liquor will soon rowze the cloudy Vapors that be night the Brain, and drive away all Mists from the Eyes. ’Tis a kind of another Phoebus to the Soul, both for inspiring and inlightening it; and in spight of all the Darkness of the Night, and all the Heaviness of the Mind, ’twill brighten and animate the Thoughts, and expel those Mists of Humors that dull and darken Meditation.
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His concluding cautionary remarks are surprisingly moderate and modern:
And yet after all, though these rare and excellent Qualities have long been observable in Tea, yet must we not imagine that they always meet with the same Effect indifferently in all Persons, or that they universally prevail. For either the Height of a Distemper, or the long Continuance of it; either the Constitution of the Person, or some certain occult Indisposition may avert the Efficacy, and obstruct or delay the desir’d Success. It may either be drunk without Advice, or at unseasonable Times; either the Water, or the Tea, may be bad; and if the Physick itself be sickly, we cannot easily expect much Health by it.
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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
The Tea is so much in vogue with the Eastern People, that there are very few who do not drink it; and the French some Years ago had it in universal Esteem; but since Coffee and Chocolate have been introduced into that Country, there is nothing near the quantity used as before…
…The Leaf is more used for Pleasure in the Liquor we call Tea, than for any medicinal Purpose; but it has a great many good Qualities, for it lightens and refreshes the Spirits, suppresses Vapours, prevents and drives away Drowsiness, strengthens the Brain and Heart, hastens Digestion, provokes Urine, cleanses or purifies the Blood, and is proper against the Scurvy....
We have six kinds of Tea used in England.... The Bohea, however is esteemed softening and nourishing, and good in all inward Decays; the Green is diuretick, and carries an agreeable Roughness with it into the Stomach, which gently astringes the Fibres, and gives them such a Tensity as is necessary for a good Digestion: Improper or excessive Use may make this, or any thing else that has any Virtues at all, do Mischief; but there are very few Instances of that; and with Moderation it certainly is one of the best, pleasantest, and safest Herbs ever introduced into Food or Medicine, and in the frequent Use of which, People generally enjoy a confirm’d Health: the Green, indeed, if drank too freely, is prejudicial to such as have weak Lungs; such People, therefore, ought to drink the Bohea with Milk in it.
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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
)
