Free The World of Caffeine by Bonnie K. Bealer Bennett Alan Weinberg

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 wasbound 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