The World of Caffeine (18 page)

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:

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:

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.”
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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.
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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.”
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In the face of this menace, Pauli saw himself as a hero carrying forward a venerable tradition of public health education:

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:

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 doctors 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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

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.”
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