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

of the Western world, their ubiquity only served to fuel the ongoing medical controversies over the hazards of casual or indiscriminate consumption and stir new inquiries into their effects on the human body.
    Some skilled in the medical lore of the seventeenth century devoted their time and talents to praising the caffeinated drinks for their ability to quicken the circulation, dispel inebriation and promote sobriety, increase alertness and creativity, cure gout, scurvy, and dropsy, relieve headaches and kidney stones, improve appetite and digestion, purify the blood, stimulate the wit, and prolong life. Others applied themselves to blaming these drinks for desiccating body and brain and inducing headaches, emaciation, impotence, and premature death. However, medical debates have rarely been conducted in isolation, free from the influences of political, economic, social, or religious forces, and the historical controversies over the merits of caffeinated beverages have been no exception. Important commercial interests were at stake in these disputes. At the same time that the Dutch East India Company tea merchants were underwriting Buntekuh, the physician who was perhaps Europe’s biggest promoter of caffeine, the French wine merchants were sponsoring his counterparts in their anticaffeine campaign.
    Printer’s ornamental engraving from Dufour’s Traitez Nouveux & curieux Du Café, Du The et Du Chocolate. This engraving, appearing at the top of each chapter in Dufour’s famous 1685 work, is one of many contemporary depictions of men of three exotic nations and the caffeinated beverages indigenous to their homelands: The Turk with his coffee, the Chinese with his cup of tea, and the Aztec with a goblet of chocolate. (The Library Company of Philadelphia)
    The Muslims not only gave to Europe the secret of drinking coffee and the institution of the coffeehouse; their sophisticated culture and science provided the basis for the medical controversies attending coffee’s introduction and proliferation in Europe as well. Medieval medical learning in the Muslim world was founded on the ancient humoral theory of Hippocrates as elaborated by Galen, and by the time coffee, tea, and chocolate arrived in and spread throughout Europe in the seventeenth century, medical thinking in the Western world, under the influence of Islamic learning, was defined by the humoral theory as well. Galen, a Greek physician who lived in Rome in the second century, posited four personal types: the melancholic, choleric, phlegmatic, and the sanguine, each corresponding with the predominance of one of the four humoral fluids and its associated properties. Food, drinks, and medicines were all considered by humoral theorists to possess one or more of these properties in one degree or another. Where a given property is present in the first degree, we have a food. Where present in the second degree, we have a food or a medicine. Where present in the third degree, we have a medicine only. Where present in the fourth degree, we have a poison.
    The Humoral Scheme
Humor                                
Temperament                                
Properties *                                 
Black Bile
Melancholic
Dry-Cold
Yellow Bile
Bilious
Dry-Hot
Phlegm
Phlegmatic
Moist-Cold
Blood
Sanguine
Moist-Hot
    *Present in the first, second, third, or fourth degrees
A Sobering View of Caffeine
    Medical men, who worried over the actions of caffeinated drinks as drugs, and laymen, who accepted them as fortifying comestibles, agreed that the beverages, whether used as medicaments or refreshments, were effective antidotes to drunkenness and could induce and promote sobriety. Walter Rumsey (1584–1660), a Welsh judge who had been a student of both Francis Bacon and William Harvey, observed in a book chapter entitled “Experiments of Cophee” that the drink had the “power to cure