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.