introduction of coffee
into England that the beverage suffered most from the indiscretions of
its friends. On the one hand, the quacks of the medical profession
sought to claim it for their own; and, on the other, more or less
ignorant laymen attributed to the drink such virtues as its real
champions among the physicians never dreamed of. It was the favorite
pastime of its friends to exaggerate coffee's merits; and of its
enemies, to vilify its users. All this furnished good "copy" for and
against the coffee house, which became the central figure in each new
controversy.

From the early English author who damned it by calling it "more
wholesome than toothsome", to Pasqua Rosee and his contemporaries, who
urged its more fantastic claims, it was forced to make its way through a
veritable morass of misunderstanding and intolerance. No harmless drink
in history has suffered more at hands of friend and foe.

Did its friends hail it as a panacea, its enemies retorted that it was a
slow poison. In France and in England there were those who contended
that it produced melancholy, and those who argued it was a cure for the
same. Dr. Thomas Willis (1621-1673), a distinguished Oxford physician
whom Antoine Portal (1742-1832) called "one of the greatest geniuses
that ever lived", said he would sometimes send his patients to the
coffee house rather than to the apothecary's shop. An old broadside,
described later in this chapter, stressed the notion that if you "do but
this Rare ARABIAN cordial use, and thou may'st all the Doctors Slops
Refuse."

As a cure for drunkenness its "magic" power was acclaimed by its
friends, and grudgingly admitted by its foes. This will appear presently
in a description of the war of the broadsides and the pamphlets. Coffee
was praised by one writer as a deodorizer. Another (Richard Bradley), in
his treatise concerning its use with regard to the plague, said if its
qualities had been fully known in 1665, "Dr. Hodges and other learned
men of that time would have recommended it." As a matter of fact, in
Gideon Harvey's _Advice against the Plague_, published in 1665, we find,
"coffee is commended against the contagion."

This is how the drink's sobering virtue was celebrated by the author of
the _Rebellious Antidote_:

Come, Frantick Fools, leave off your Drunken fits.
Obsequious be and I'll recall your Wits,
From perfect Madness to a modest Strain
For farthings four I'll fetch you back again,
Enable