The World of Caffeine (22 page)
Read The World of Caffeine Online
Authors: Bonnie K. Bealer Bennett Alan Weinberg
Moseley sums up his study with reasonable reflections that have a surprisingly modern sound. Although acknowledging that coffee and tea may be harmful to some people in some conditions of health, he finds, overall, that their use is both pleasant and potentially of great benefit to the public at large, whose new access to these drinks, afforded by the drop in duties, he celebrates as offering an antidote to the “chronical infirmaties” attending the rise of modern urban life. Sounding almost like a twentieth-century environmentalist, Moseley advances coffee as a kind of green remedy for the ills of urban life:
Let us reflect on the state of atmosphere [air quality]; the food, and modes of life of the inhabitants so injurious to youth and beauty, filling the large towns and cities with chronical infirmaties; and I think it will be evident what advantages will result from the general use of Coffee in England, as an article of diet from the comforts of which the poor are not excluded, and to what purposes it may often be employed, as a safe and powerful medicine.
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Samuel Christian Hahnemann (1755–1843), the man for whom Philadelphia’s Hahnemann Hospital was named and the creator of the school of homeopathic medicine (a theory of drug treatment that reached the acme of its influence in the United States in the 1890s but persisted especially in and around Philadelphia, remained in vogue as a quack therapy among the British and European royalty and aristocracy, and is undergoing a revival today),
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recognized that caffeine delivered temporary energizing effects but asserted that, like other intoxicating, stimulating, or psychoactive drugs, its value to the user was more than offset by its harm. Hahnemann based his conjectures about caffeine on a general theory of homeostasis, a notion, harkening back to humoral theory, that good health consists of the proper regulation or balance of the bodily systems.
According to this notion, anything that interfered with this balance, even if the interference initially produced apparently beneficial effects, would ultimately prove deleterious to the organism. Hahnemann acknowledged that caffeine could increase endurance, strength, and mental acuity. His disapproval of its use was based on his recognition of its power to do these things; for Hahnemann argued that, though caffeine allows you to burn energy more quickly now, you will suffer a corresponding letdown later, initiating a debilitating cycle that is ultimately less productive than staying on an even keel by abstaining from caffeine altogether. As he states, coffee engenders an “artificially heightened sense of being…. Presence of mind, alertness, and empathy are all elevated more than in a healthy natural condition.”
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These apparently benign effects, he says, disturb the natural cadence of the biological system, which depends on the alternating rhythms of wakefulness and sleepiness.
In 1803, Hahnemann wrote in
Der Kaffee in seinen Wirkungen:
In the first moments or first quarter hour of waking, especially when waking occurs earlier than usual, probably everyone who does not live in an entirely primitive state of nature experiences an unpleasant sensation of less than fully roused consciousness, gloominess, a sluggishness and stiffness in the limbs; quick movements are difficult, and thinking is hard. But lo and behold, coffee dispels this natural but unpleasant feeling, this discomfort of mind and body, almost immediately.... [The] unpleasant fatigue of mind and body with the natural approach of sleep, quickly vanishes with this medicinal drink; sleepiness vanishes, and an artificial sprightliness, a wakefulness wrested from Nature takes its place.
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In 1833 John Cole published a much-cited study in the English medical journal
Lancet,
in which he presented some of the harms that could befall excessive users of tea and coffee.
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Cole never mentions caffeine and may not have been acquainted with Runge’s isolation of the chemical a decade earlier; for the word “caffeine” had been first used in English only three years before, by Lindley, in his
Natural History of Botany
(1830): “Coffee is…supposed to owe its characters to a peculiar chemical principle called caffeine,”
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In any case, Cole probably did not attribute the pharmacological actions of coffee to caffeine, and it was even less likely that he attributed the actions of tea to the drug, because “theine,” isolated only six years before as tea’s active agent, had probably not yet been identified as caffeine. Citing the “almost universal use of tea and coffee as articles of diet” as proof that their effects are generally agreeable, Cole nevertheless asserts that there are many exceptions. It was these exceptions that prompted him to study the harmful effects of tea, as Cole, like many before him, thought that a discussion of tea’s effects would suffice for coffee as well.
Cole must have been serving some strong infusions of caffeine, to judge from the following statement, in which he distinguishes the effects of highly caffeinated coffee and black tea from those of green tea, which is low in caffeine:
When black tea, or coffee, has been taken, considerable excitement often ushers in this succession of phenomena; the face becomes flushed, the eyes sparkle with an unusual brilliance, all the earlier effects of intoxication from alcohol are observable; the pulse being full and throbbing, and considerably quickened. If green tea have been taken, the previous excitement is less, or perhaps not at all perceptible. The skin soon becomes pale, the eyes are sunken, the pulse feeble, quick, and fluttering, or slow and weak.
Cole next discusses the symptoms that indicate the harmful effects of tea, the use of which, in some frail persons, he thinks results in an identifiable disease:
To the coldness and benumbed feeling of the back of the head, there is added formication of the scalp, violent pain in the head, dimness of the sight, unsteadiness in walking, vertigo, and these are accompanied by a feeble fluttering pulse…
I may add here, that the mind does not escape, but partakes of the disorders of the body, as is seen by the temper becoming peevish and irritable, so as to render the sufferer a torment to himself, and all those about him.
The following are among the nine case studies which Cole proceeds to review, diagnosing tea as the culprit in all of them: “Pain at Stomach…rejection of Food”; disturbance in “The Functions of the Heart”; “Syncope,” or fainting; “sudden attacks of Insensibility”; “Headache”; and, finally, “Convulsions.” Cole concludes with what may be the first attempt to link cardiovascular pathology with chronic caffeine use:
If it be true, as it has been held, that the continued disturbance of the function of an organ will induce change of structure, what are we to expect from the use of tea twice a day, when it deranges the function of the heart for three or four hours after each time of its being taken? If the answer be, that it may be expected to induce some structural disease, there arises this other question,—May not the greater prevalence of cardiac disease of late years have been considerably influenced by the increased consumption of coffee and tea?
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Coffee is an affair of fifteen or twenty days; just the right amount of time to write an opera.
—Gioacchino Antonio Rossini (1792–1868) to Balzac
Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), one of the greatest and most prolific storytellers in history, was unquestionably a drug addict. His drug of choice was caffeine. Because he was unacquainted with the chemical itself, Balzac, like many other caffeine enthusiasts before him, equated the effects of caffeine with those of its primary vehicle, coffee.
While still at boarding school, Balzac indebted himself to a corrupt concierge, who smuggled in the forbidden beans, still expensive colonial produce, to secure his first supply. His mother was furious over his self-indulgence, perhaps sensing that it was the beginning a lifelong love-hate relationship with the stimulant and a nearly forty-year slide into dissipated health. In his adult life, Balzac slept in the early evening and, rising at midnight, wrote his novels through the night, the next morning, and into the early afternoon. It was coffee, compulsively and systematically consumed in incrementally increasing doses, that made these lucubrations possible. Like any true drug addict, he believed the output of his creative energies depended upon coffee’s chemical arousal.
In the tradition of Ovington’s claim that caffeine comes to the aid of the muse, Balzac, in his book
Traité des Excitants
Modernes
(1839), or
On Modern Stimulants,
provides us with a compelling account of the use of caffeine as an analeptic to keep you awake so you can work, and as an aid to the imagination, which stimulates the flow of ideas and images. In this passage, Balzac conceives of coffee exclusively as a drug, speaking of increasing the “dose” to maintain its pharmacological effects and noting its toxic effects on the stomach and the unstable behavior that attends its sustained use. It would be impossible to improve on the words of one of history’s greatest prose stylists when he describes his encounter with caffeine:
Coffee is a great power in my life; I have observed its effects on an epic scale Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people even more boring.
Coffee sets the blood in motion and stimulates the muscles; it accelerates the digestive process, chases away sleep, and gives us the capacity to engage a little longer in the exercise of our intellects.
Coffee…reaches the brain by barely perceptible radiations that escape complete analysis: that aside, we may surmise that our primary nervous flux conducts an electricity emitted by coffee when we drink it. Coffee’s power changes over time. “Coffee,” Rossini told me, “is an affair of fifteen or twenty days; just the right amount of time to write an opera.” This is true, but the length of time during which one can enjoy the benefits of coffee can be extended.
For a while—for a week or two at most—you can obtain the right amount of stimulation with one, then two cups of coffee brewed from beans that have been crushed with gradually increasing force and infused with hot water. For another week, by decreasing the amount of water used, by pulverizing the coffee even more finely, and by infusing the grounds with cold water, you can continue to obtain the same cerebral power.
When you have produced the finest grind with the least water possible, you double the dose by drinking two cups at a time; particularly vigorous constitutions can tolerate three cups. In this manner, one can continue working for several days.
Finally, I have discovered a horrible, rather brutal method that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor. It is a question of using finely pulverized, dense coffee, cold and anhydrous [dry], consumed on an empty stomach. This coffee falls into your stomach, a sack whose velvety interior is lined with tapestries of suckers and papillae. The coffee finds nothing else in the sack, and so it attacks these delicate and voluptuous linings;…it brutalizes these beautiful stomach linings…sparks shoot all the way up to the brain. From that moment on, everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop, the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination’s orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink—for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water.
I recommended this way of drinking coffee to a friend of mine, who absolutely wanted to finish a job promised for the next day: he thought he’d been poisoned and took to his bed….
The state coffee puts one in when it is drunk on an empty stomach under these magisterial conditions, produces a kind of animation that looks like anger: one’s voice rises, one’s gestures suggest unhealthy impatience; one wants everything to proceed with the speed of ideas; one becomes brusque, ill-tempered, about nothing. One assumes that everyone is equally lucid. A man of spirit must therefore avoid going out in public. I discovered this singular state
through a series of accidents that made me lose, without any effort, the ecstasy that I had been feeling. Some friends witnessed me arguing about everything, haranguing with monumental bad faith. The following day I recognized my wrongdoing, and we searched the cause…and we found the problem soon enough: coffee wanted its victim.
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In this passage coffee is treated in terms that are commonplace among users of heroin and cocaine, but more unusual among users of caffeine. Especially noteworthy is Balzac’s account of ratcheting up doses so as to maintain the effect despite a growing tolerance. For Balzac, this process culminates in eating dry coffee powder. In a manner reminiscent of alcoholics, he speaks of socially unacceptable conduct induced by caffeine intoxication that became so embarrassing it kept him indoors whenever he drank coffee heavily thereafter.
The road of drug addiction often ends in premature death. This was the French novelist’s fate, according to Dr. Nacquart, Balzac’s physician, who had known him since 1815, the year he began to use the toxic substance: “An old heart complaint, frequently aggravated by working through the night and by the use or rather the abuse of coffee, to which he had recourse in order to counteract man’s natural propensity to sleep, had just taken a new and fatal turn.”
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