Special Collections
Book of the Month, May 2006
Coffee has been drunk in Europe since the seventeenth century and the first London coffee-house was opened in Cornhill in 1652. Publications concerning coffee soon followed.
The author of this work is Daniel Duncan (1649-1735), a Montauban-born physician of Scottish stock who lived primarily in France and then London, and who wrote several respected medical works. That featured here first appeared in French, as Avis salutaire a tout le monde contre l'abus des choses chaudes (Rotterdam, 1705). The English translation celebrates its 300th anniversary this year. The work, which circulated in manuscript form before publication, goes back to 1699, when its dedicatee, Philip, landgrave of Hesse, sent for Duncan because his wife was seriously ill. Duncan diagnosed an abuse of hot liquors, such as tea and coffee.
The text is a balanced treatise, taking the line that nothing on earth is entirely good or bad in itself, and advocating moderation. Following chapters on the cause of the different effects of coffee, chocolate and tea, apologies for these hot drinks and an answer to the apology for coffee, the chapters have such titles as: “The injury done to the vital operations by the abuse of coffee, tea, chocolate, wine, brandy and other hot things” (similarly named chapters discuss injury done to the breast and vital faculty; the natural faculties and the abdomen or lower belly; the liver; and the spleen). Further sections discuss such matters as “if hot liquors be always good against wind”, “Whether coffee be an universal medicine”; “whether coffee makes people prolifick or barren”; and “Whether coffee, tea, chocolate and other hot things, favour the animal actions”. Duncan concludes that the abuse of all hot drinks produces similar effects, but that coffee does the most harm simply because it is the most common. Coffee can be useful, if drunk in moderation – but Duncan concludes by pointing out that Methuselah, who lived for nearly 1,000 years, drank nothing but water.
Although not unique, this is an unusual work in the Goldsmiths’ Library of Economic Literature, which, in its few works about coffee, concentrates on the trade element. Foxwell’s interest in the matter may have increased after he had sold his library to the Goldsmiths’ Company and was accruing his second collection, to judge by titles held in the Kress Library at Harvard, with digital and microfilm copies at Senate House: e.g. Le bon usage du thé, du caffé, et du chocolat pour la preservation & pour la guerison des maladies, by Nicolas de Blegny (Lyons, 1687); The Natural History of Coffee, Thee [sic], Chocolate, Tobacco, by John Chamberlayne (London, 1682).
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