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

coffee had been accepted by European physicians on the strength of selfserving Arab testimonials disseminated to develop new markets 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 alreadyassumed 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.
    Though Colomb’s exhortations and the admonitions of the physicians of Aix failed to impress the public at large, they did help to prejudice the views of the medical community for some time. Partly as a result of Colomb’s arguments, most French doctors toward the end of the seventeenth century advised against the use of coffee as a comestible, maintaining that it was a potent and potentially dangerous drug that should be taken by prescription only. Lurid stories about coffee poisoning abounded. When Jean Baptiste Colbert (1619–83), financier and statesman, died, it was whispered that his stomach had been corroded by coffee. According to another letter penned by Elizabeth Charlotte, duchess of Orléans, an autopsy revealed that the princess of Hanau-Birkenfeld had hundreds of stomach ulcers, each filled with coffee grounds, and it was concluded that she had died of coffee drinking.
    Not every Gallic scientist was so easily persuaded of the evils of caffeine. Philippe Sylvestre Dufour (1622–87), an archaeologist, joined with Charles Spon (1609–84), a Lyon physician, scholar, and Latin poet, and Cassaigne, another local physician, to perform a chemical analysis of coffee. Based on this collaborative effort, Dufour wrote his famous work mentioned at the opening of this chapter, which was reissued in many editions and translations, but which is now only to be found in rare book rooms, Traitez Nouveaux & curieux Du Café, Du Thé et Du Chocolate (1685). 22 This was the first book to attempt to derive the pharmacologic effects of coffee from its chemical constituents. Among its other benefits, Dufour asserted that coffee counteracted drunkenness and nausea and