Our national habit is feeble. Debility is recognized as the prevailing type of our diseases. Nervous exhaustion is met by recourse to all kinds of stimulation. We are apt to think coffee and tea as harmless, or rather as slow in their deleterious action, as any. Are they nothing more?
As debility marks the degeneration of our physical constitution, so does a morbid sensitiveness at all earthly indulgence, a tendency to reform things innocent, although useless, betray the weakness of the moral health of our day. An ascetic spirit is abroad; our amateur physiologists look rather to a mortification than an honest building-up of the flesh. They prefer naked muscle to rounded outline, and seek rather to test than to enjoy their bodies. Fearing to be Epicureans, they become Spartans, as far as their feebler organizations will allow them, and very successful Stoics, by the aid of Saxon will. By a faulty logic, things which in excess are hurtful are denied a moderate use. Habits innocent in themselves are to be cast aside, lest they induce others which are injurious.
There is but little danger that Puritan antecedents and a New England climate should tend to idle indulgence or Epicurean sloth. We think there is a tendency to reform too far. We confess our preference for the physique of Apollo to that of Hercules. We acknowledge an amiable weakness for those bounties of Nature which soothe or comfort us or renew our nervous energy, and which, we think, injure us no more than our daily bread, if not immoderately used.
Science almost always finds some foundation in fact for popular prejudices. For years, men have continued wasting their substance on coffee and tea, insisting that they strengthened as well as comforted them, in spite of the warnings of the sanitarian, who looked on them solely as stimulants or sedatives, and of the economist, who bewailed their extravagant cost.
Physiology, relying on organic chemistry, has at least justified by experiment the choice of the civilized world. Coffee and tea had been regarded by the physiologist and the physician as stimulants of the nervous system, and to a less extent and secondarily of the circulation, and that was all. To fulfil this object, and to answer the endless craving for habitual excitants of the cerebral functions, they had been admitted reluctantly to the diet of their patients, rather as necessary evils than as positive goods. It was reserved for the all-searching German mind to discover their better qualities; and it is only within the last five years, that the self-sacrificing experiments of Dr. Böcker of Bonn, and of Dr. Julius Lehmann, have raised them to their proper place in dietetics, as "Accessory Foods." This term, which we borrow from the remarkable work on "Digestion and its Derangements," by Dr. Thomas K. Chambers, of London, is only the slightest of the many obligations which we hasten to acknowledge ourselves under to this author, as will appear from citations in the course of this article.
