Part 3

Sano 1.07 O-Nic-O .72 Sackett .67

The smoking tobaccos tested ran--

Normal

Blue Boar Pipe 1.45 Weldon Slice 1.84 Hudson Bay Imperial 1.95 Gilbert’s Mixture 2.09

“Denicotinized”

Dormy Smoking 2.26 Sackett .98 O-Nic-O .97

In short, the average for all brands tested stood 1.77 percent nicotine straight and 1.28 percent still in the “denicotinized” products. Seventy-two percent of the nicotine remains behind. The process is, like the process of removing caffeine from coffees, very largely bunk but it is bunk that makes the American people spend their money, as Barnum very well knew. A person can with considerable ease select an ordinary tobacco which is so near the nicotine content of the “denicotinized” varieties that he scarcely seems justified in paying the higher prices for the treated product.

Was ever a nation so neurotic over its health as ours? European observers are constantly amazed at the imbecile delight we show in all sorts of products especially treated to make them less toxic, more digestible, less harmful and more beneficial. Just tell an American that you have vacuum treated your coffee and have thereby removed some obscure organic compounds which normally tie his stomach in knots and he will faithfully believe you and buy it. Tell him you have taken the nicotine out of his cigarette and though 72 percent of it is still there he will buy. Tell him Grapenuts make his teeth sound and he will buy. Tell him that he can improve his health by standing on his head on a cake of ice in a blast furnace while somebody shoots a stream of liquid platinum in his left ear and you will find some fool to do it in America. Why are we such damned fools? I am not going to tell you. I don’t know. But we are.

IS COFFEE DRINKING HARMFUL?

It is recorded in the annals of history that a certain doctor once told a certain patient to drink no coffee. Were you, perchance, the patient? I know I was. But why did the doctor say that? Because if we stopped there would be more coffee left for him?

It is also recorded that there once lived a certain Arab whose name comes down to us as Chadely. Chadely is reputed to have been the initial coffee drinker of the world and he drank an extract of the berry to combat a continual drowsiness which prevented him from attending punctually his religious devotions! In this others of the Mohammedan faithful rapidly followed him, and the habit might well be cultivated by certain church-going Christians with sedative pastors.

Now I am one of those most unfortunate persons over whom alcohol has no appreciable authority. I confess this with shame and deep humiliation. Right in this Prohibition Era when various nondescript alcoholic beverages are held in higher esteem than ever before in our history (for does not the lowliest shellac now become a sacred and inviolate symbol of a personal liberty we would not recognize in this collectivist country if we saw it?) I can drink one, two or even three glasses of high voltage and yet remain placid, neutral, passionless, taciturn and erect in posture. So far as I am concerned even the dynamic and remorseless cocktail of these days is just so much ill-tasting liquid. Isn’t this tragic?

But I would not prohibit the sale, ingurgitation or even the flagrant abuse of these curiously synthesized beverages, or even of good alcohol drinks. Not for one single prohibitive instant. For I want my coffee and some day some bluenose wowser might seek to deprive me of the cup that really cheers me. For I can arise in the morning hopeless, misanthropic, pessimistic, with a strong suicidal impulse, a feeling of uselessness and a Calvinistic conviction of sin--yet one cup of good coffee completely reverses my emotions and stirs me to optimism, confidence, cheer and incipient exaltation. I can be induced to consider new fur coats and parlor rugs.

Or again, in the evening, I may have sunk into a mental stupor, becoming in fact so definitely subhuman that I can only listen to a radio or read a newspaper--but coffee at once changes the entire universe and suffuses me with self-satisfaction, energy, will power and complacency--jostles my brain cells rudely against each other and clicks out of them what little useful information there is in them. Indeed I strongly sympathize with any dull soul who momentarily sweeps aside the stagnant miasmas of toil, monotony and misery with a swig of ethyl alcohol--in varied disguise. Insensitive to alcohol I do exactly the same thing with caffeine.

It is a most curious matter upon which to meditate. The entire universe is not something static and permanently postulated by definition. It is not even what I made it a moment ago. It is what coffee makes me and makes me make it at this moment. Leaving my entire environment, debts and all, and my complete mental and somatic equipment in statu quo one dash of caffeine completely reorganizes the universe for me and as completely modifies my reaction thereto. The final test in any scientific experiment takes place when one variable factor accomplishes such results while all other factors remain completely unaltered. I know my coffee.

But of course this is a world wherein doctors sound solemn tocsins to pleasure. You go to them and they almost invariably admonish you to quit smoking tobacco and drinking coffee, to have your teeth pulled and your tonsils uprooted. Some years ago I myself suffered from chronic indigestion. I was on a meticulous diet which lacked meat and coffee and I was about ready to accuse coffee alone of all my indispositions. But I met a hardy old codger of eighty who drank eight cups of strong coffee daily and had but recently reduced his consumption from a normal dozen and his vigor, which he attributed to seventy years of strong coffee, greatly heartened me. I knew what the doctor would say. I didn’t smoke. Teeth and coffee alone were left. So I went soberly to the expert in exodontia.

He at first demurred and insisted that I had no teeth meriting destruction. But I was desperate. I insisted. So he X-rayed around, finally selected an inoffensive and courteous molar and drew it. The shock or something proved beneficial. At least I had no more indigestion and even learned how to drink two cups of strong coffee and go to sleep on the draft. This is the final step in expert coffee drinking. When you can perform that feat and outwit your imagination you have come into the inner circle of The Sacred Coffee Drinkers’ Conclave.

But I remained curious. I wondered why doctors said drink no coffee. I determined to find out something about this. Botany didn’t get me very far. It simply declared “Coffee is the product of a rubiaceous plant indigenous to Abyssinia of the genus coffea; there are about twenty-five known species, of which coffea Arabica is the most important commercially.”

History was slightly more productive. It appeared coffee drinking was of respectable age and that the substance derived its name from K’hawah, or Kaffa, an Abyssinian Province, and that there it was employed as a stimulant for centuries before its introduction into Arabia. The Arab physician Khayes, who lived 850-922 A. D., wrote on coffee and knowledge of the plant arrived in Europe by the late sixteenth century. It is most interesting to remember that these Arabian Mohammedans used coffee as an anti-soporific during prolonged religious ceremonies. Yet the beverage at first underwent violent protest because strictly orthodox and conservative priests held it to be intoxicating and hence under the ban of the Koran.

At Constantinople certain dervishes also held that after roasting coffee had become a kind of coal which the Prophet had denounced as inedible. Thereupon the coffee houses were closed. But a lenient mufti later proved to the satisfaction of the faithful that roasted coffee was not coal and they were reopened.

The earliest European coffee houses were established, in fact, in Constantinople and in Venice. The first one appeared in England in 1650; out of it grew the Oxford Coffee Club in 1655 and from that sprang the Royal Society itself. But alas, convivial gatherings at coffee houses became of ill repute; wives complained they could not expect their husbands back from errands because they would loiter in coffee houses and kings declared that their subjects met at coffee houses, became garrulous and bespoke political rebellion. The current Volstead, Charles II, therefore, sought to suppress coffee drinking, but evidently Anglo-Saxons valued their liberties more then than now for the King had little success. Frederick the Great, fearing coffee drinking for the more thrifty reason that it caused too much money to leave his domain, boldly attributed sterility to indulgence in the berry and sought to restrict the use of coffee by a license system.

The medical profession came forward to denounce coffee for all sorts of sins. The English Dr. Pecoke accused it of causing leprosy. Dr. Duncan of Montpellier in 1706 wrote in opposition to all hot beverages while James the I actually composed a royal “Broadside Against Coffee.” The kingly book contained this gem--

Confusion huddles all into one scene, Like Noah’s arks, the clean and the unclean, For now, alas! the drink has credit got, And he’s no gentleman who drinks it not.

Millingen in his “Curiosities of Medical Experiences,” 1837, said that coffee in excess produced “feverish heat and a predisposition to apoplexy.” But he did commend coffee and tea as beverages affording stimulus without producing intoxication. Francis Bacon declared that “coffee comforteth the heart and helpeth digestion” while Bach, to offset this, wrote his Cantata No. 211 of the “Secular Cantatas” to protest its use.

In 1792 Dr. Benjamin Moseley said doubt existed as to whether coffee was a tonic or a sedative, but believed that it had intrinsic food value. Every now and then individuals arise to denounce or to praise an article of diet or a diet system and to declare that all men should hear and follow because this idea was of benefit to them. Such statements can have no standing in science, even when made by a doctor and based upon his actual experiences with a few patients. The only possible way to find out whether coffee, say, is beneficial, or the reverse is to investigate the literature and try to poll the authorities each one of whom has examined large numbers of individual cases to see if any general statements can be hazarded. Even then we cannot make final conclusions but we can assay general trends.

Is coffee harmful then? What do physiologists, pharmacologists and medical men say? Coffee demonstrably enlivens the intellect, removes the sensation of fatigue and makes the subject feel more comfortable. These are gifts not to be sniffed out of court. But is coffee safe and harmless enough that we may dare indulge ourselves in this pleasant reaction in a world where the pleasant is so readily assumed to be per se the invidious--and so often is actually so? The question is in dispute like most questions considered settled by many people. There is no more reason to conclude one way than the other in so far as average adults are concerned. All who say dogmatically “No coffee--it is very harmful” are as wrong as all who state the opposite of this.

In his “Personal and Community Health” C. E. Turner says coffee is not harmful to most adults in reasonable quantities. G. N. Stewart’s “Physiology” remarks that tea and coffee are safe stimulants because they have no bad after effects. Stewart also cautions against their abuse, but it may as well be stated at once that the question of abuse introduces an altogether new factor. Water and salt are absolutely necessary to life but the abuse of either is injurious. We can produce true water intoxications and salt eaten to excess can do us much harm. All articles of diet from parsnips and lamb chops to caffeine and alcohol can harm if abused and we should assume when speaking of them a sane, rational use and regard abuse as a harmful condition of a different order altogether.

As C. E. A. Winslow well says in his “Healthy Living”--“The fact that tea and coffee sometimes become tyrants does not mean that such drinks are necessarily bad.”