From the earliest days of medicine, doctors have come to many unsound conclusions relating to tea and coffee. Ignorance continued to dominate thinking about these beverages until the beginning of the nineteenth century when caffeine was discovered and chemically defined and then incorrectly classified as a narcotic.
In tracing the history of anti-coffee crusaders, Ian Bersten has uncovered bizarre theories based on sexual paradigms from the first health reform movements. The inventor of Homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann, wrote against coffee in the nineteenth century. The chief opposition came from one of the most influential health fanatics, John Harvey Kellogg.