COFFEE AS A MEDICINE.
In recent times coffee has been considered, not as an article of food,
but partly as a spice and partly as a kind of medicine. Spice it is,
inasmuch as it causes, like many other spices, the stomach to secrete an
increased quantity of gastric juice. Digestion only takes place when the
sides of the stomach secrete a liquid having the quality of digesting
food. Owing to this, well-to-do people take after dinner a cup of coffee
in order to promote digestion. It is because at night the power of
digesting is very much enfeebled--hence the bad sleep after one has
eaten something difficult to digest--and because the stomach is relaxed
and inactive, that a cup of coffee in the morning refreshes and
stimulates the coats of the stomach, and causes there renewed vigor and
activity. It is a common observation, that more appetite is felt after
coffee than before it. So much for the importance of coffee as a spice.
Very justly we ascribe to coffee also a medicinal influence; we consider
it a medicine for our mental activity, and for the activity of the
nerves.
It is well known that at night coffee dispels fatigue, and that by the
use of strong coffee sleep may be banished for a long time. And more;
those that are busy mentally, often feel a fresh, invigorating impulse
after the enjoyment of coffee; when fatigued with work, they make it a
means to recruit their strength. For a similar reason, coffee can
animate conversation. When we meet elderly ladies in society, and notice
them sitting quietly and talking but in monosyllables, we need not be
surprised; they have had no coffee yet! But when, after a little,
conversation flows with full force like a rapid stream of water, we may
from this safely recognize the mighty influence of coffee; it has
loosened not only the tongues, but more--the looks, the hands, nay, the
whole body and the whole soul.
Although the mind has rested during the night, we feel in the morning
rather sleepy than otherwise, and hence it is, that we are every morning
desirous of stimulating our nervous system with a cup of coffee,
preparing, as it were, our mind for the day's work. A modern naturalist,
as genial as he is learned, Moleschott, ascribes the lately increased
consumption of coffee to the greater degree of mental activity, which
life in former times did not require to such a high extent as our
present age.
We have now sufficiently explained the need of coffee-drinking, and we
must confess that all we have said here does not in the least affect our
conviction that, according to Liebig, coffee is also nutritive. And no
one can help believing this who has seen how old people can subsist on
but very little food, provided they can have plenty of coffee. The
objection raised, that it would be better for these persons to take the
nitrogen contained in coffee in the form of meat, is correct; but, on
the other hand, we must stop to ask, whether meat would be good for the
stomach at all such times as a cup of coffee is! This would certainly
not be the case early in the morning; and if in the coffee we enjoy a
beverage which gives us nutriment, strengthens the stomach and at the
same time stimulates our mind, we have good reasons to reverence the
instinct of man which raised coffee to an essential means of
subsistence, and discovered its beneficial influence long before this
was done by science.