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

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