- Email: [email protected]
COFFEE WITHOUT CAFFEINE.
30FFEE WITHOUT CAFFEINE.-INFANT MORTALITY IN MARYLEBONE. the parents, and to lessen the drink evil.
In its
these most praiseworthy objects the League has sympathy and hearty good wishes.
pursuit of
our
cordial
COFFEE WITHOUT CAFFEINE. IN THE LANCET of Oct. 27th, p.
1159,
we
mentioned the
remarkable circumstance that the coffee beans yielded by certain species of coffee had been found to contain no caffeine. The evidence as to the facts is quite complete, for full chemical analyses of the beans and descriptive particulars of the plants have been published in 1901 and 1905 by M. Gabriel Bertrand.l The coffee beans examined by him were obtained from four species of coffea all growing wild, three of them in Madagascar and one in Great Comoro Island, which is situated in the Mozambique Channel 350 miles north-west of Madagascar. Both in the raw state and also when roasted the beans had the appearance of ordinary coffee of variable or indifferent quality. The common coffee plant is aojfea Arabioa, and ordinary coffee beans contain from 10 to 15 grammes of caffeine per kilo-
1615
In Huddersfield Mr. Alderman Broadbent organised his own staff of visitors but in Marylebone there is already at hand a working organisation which is fully competent to carry out such a scheme on a large scale, for the Borough of St. Marylebone Health Society, with the medical officer of health as chairman, is pursuing a very active campaign in the district with the same object in view. This comparatively young society has already done excellent work and by the dissemination of literature bearing on this subject and by the personal visits of its members it has introduced to many a home a useful knowledge of the steps which are necessary for rearing strong and healthy children. The members of the society have been carefully selected and carefully trained by a series of lectures and demonstrations and a series of "talks with mothers"are now in progress in various selected centres ; one baby show has already been held in the district and others are in contemplation and it is hoped that these shows, which are held under the auspices of the society, will serve as useful object lessons in dispelling from the minds of the mothers the many prejudices and wrongly conceived notions which are held with regard to the desirable points and features of infant development. A valuable element in the Marylebone campaign is the institution at the St. Marylebone General Dispensary of a scheme of "infant consultations"; somewhat similar enterprises have produced excellent results in Paris and in other large centres of population in France, but so far as we know this is the first of its kind to be established in England. At these con-sultations the infants are from time to time weighed and thoroughly examined, while full notes of their condition are recorded. The mothers are advised and instructed in thebest methods of the management of infants, and prizes are offered at the end of each year to those mothers who have been most regular in their attendances- and who have followed out the instructions given with the greatest care and attention. The lady visitors of the society attend at the consultations and assist in the weighing and the taking of notes, and in so doing they acquire experience which serves them in good stead in their subsequent house-to-house visiting. In Marylebone the infant mortality has of recent yearsbeen conspicuously low for a metropolitan district, so that with the mayor’s generous offer and the active operation of the Health Society we shall look for some really remarkable reduction in the annual death-rate among babies in this district.
M. Bertrand has, however, discovered that the of the ooffea Mauretiana, cultivated in the part of Guinea which is French territory, contains no more than 0’7 gramme of caffeine per kilogramme. He therefore argues that the proportion of caffeine in the bean as well as the fact of its complete absence in certain species ought to be included amorg the botanical characteristics of the coffee plant. In his two articles on the subject published in the Omnptes Rendu8 M. Bertrand makes no references either to the actual date of his important discovery or to any analyses made by other chemists, but on the paragraph in THE LANCET coming to the knowledge of Herr Heinrich Trillich, a chemist in Munich, he wrote to us inclosing a reprint of an article which appeared in vol. iv. of the Ze2tsonrift fur bffentlic7te OJwmie. In this comwhich is " Ueber Kaffee mit thtdnenheaded munication, Bohnen" with Coffee förmigen (On Tear-shaped Beans), Herr Trillich states that in 1892, 1894, and 1896 he received from the island of Bourbon samples of the so-called "cafe marron" which grows wild there and is used by the natives but is not exported. He says that the beans are decidedly of the nature of coffee (entsohieden Kaifeeoohnen) but of a somewhat globular form (tear-shaped). When roasted they behave like ordinary coffee, give off the aroma of coffee, and yield an infusion strongly resembling coffee but of a disagreeable harsh taste. He found that this café marron contained no caffeine. He suggests that it may OUR CONCEPTION OF HEALTH AND DISEASE. be the produce of wild plants of eoffea Bourbonioa. The THE difficulty of constructing a definition of health or of island of Bourbon, more commonly called Reunion, is a its in miles the Indian Ocean about 480 east French possession contrary, disease, has often forcibly presented itself tolecturers on medicine and to writers of text-books of of Madagascar.
gramme.
produce
____
-
it is true that these terms represent ultimate ideas, like pleasure and pain, and admit of nG’ definition-a process which usually consists in referring a concept to a wider and better-known class in which it is included. Still, attempts have to be made to evade the difficulty and to arrive at a working description at all events. The problem has recently been faced once more, this time by Professor Sheridan Delepine; and his attempt is of the’ greater interest in that it is embodied in an address which was written some 20 years ago and was only recently published with a few alterations needed to bring it up to date. He proceeds on the most hopeful line-namely, the application of the theory of evolution to matters medical. At the basis of this theory lies the conception of life as the interaction between a living organism and its environment, and from this it follows that all disease, whether apparently hereditary or visibly acquired, is due to the influence of outside factors acting either on the individual affected ’or on his ancestors.Health,, then, consists in a sort.
pathology. Probably
INFANT MORTALITY IN MARYLEBONE. FOLLOWING the precedent set by Mr. Alderman Broadbent, during his year of office as Mayor of Huddersfield, in offering a present of .J2.1to the parents of each child who survived the first year of life, Sir Thomas BrookeHitching, the Mayor of Marylebone, has made a similar offer to the residents of his borough who are on the Burgess registry and whose weekly earnings do not exceed 2. The Huddersfield scheme has worked remarkably well in reducing the infant mortality in the northern centre
and
there
is
no
reason
to
suppose
that
in
Marylebone the same incentive to care in the rearing of infants will give less excellent results, provided that the
ing
same care be taken in the house-to-house visitand in the dissemination of the requisite knowledge.
1 Comptes Rendus de l’Académie des Sciences, Paris, 1901, vol. cxxxii., p. 162; 1905, vol. cxli., p. 209; Bulletin de la Société Chimique, 1901, third series, vol. xxv., p. 379.
In its
these most praiseworthy objects the League has sympathy and hearty good wishes.
pursuit of
our
cordial
COFFEE WITHOUT CAFFEINE. IN THE LANCET of Oct. 27th, p.
1159,
we
mentioned the
remarkable circumstance that the coffee beans yielded by certain species of coffee had been found to contain no caffeine. The evidence as to the facts is quite complete, for full chemical analyses of the beans and descriptive particulars of the plants have been published in 1901 and 1905 by M. Gabriel Bertrand.l The coffee beans examined by him were obtained from four species of coffea all growing wild, three of them in Madagascar and one in Great Comoro Island, which is situated in the Mozambique Channel 350 miles north-west of Madagascar. Both in the raw state and also when roasted the beans had the appearance of ordinary coffee of variable or indifferent quality. The common coffee plant is aojfea Arabioa, and ordinary coffee beans contain from 10 to 15 grammes of caffeine per kilo-
1615
In Huddersfield Mr. Alderman Broadbent organised his own staff of visitors but in Marylebone there is already at hand a working organisation which is fully competent to carry out such a scheme on a large scale, for the Borough of St. Marylebone Health Society, with the medical officer of health as chairman, is pursuing a very active campaign in the district with the same object in view. This comparatively young society has already done excellent work and by the dissemination of literature bearing on this subject and by the personal visits of its members it has introduced to many a home a useful knowledge of the steps which are necessary for rearing strong and healthy children. The members of the society have been carefully selected and carefully trained by a series of lectures and demonstrations and a series of "talks with mothers"are now in progress in various selected centres ; one baby show has already been held in the district and others are in contemplation and it is hoped that these shows, which are held under the auspices of the society, will serve as useful object lessons in dispelling from the minds of the mothers the many prejudices and wrongly conceived notions which are held with regard to the desirable points and features of infant development. A valuable element in the Marylebone campaign is the institution at the St. Marylebone General Dispensary of a scheme of "infant consultations"; somewhat similar enterprises have produced excellent results in Paris and in other large centres of population in France, but so far as we know this is the first of its kind to be established in England. At these con-sultations the infants are from time to time weighed and thoroughly examined, while full notes of their condition are recorded. The mothers are advised and instructed in thebest methods of the management of infants, and prizes are offered at the end of each year to those mothers who have been most regular in their attendances- and who have followed out the instructions given with the greatest care and attention. The lady visitors of the society attend at the consultations and assist in the weighing and the taking of notes, and in so doing they acquire experience which serves them in good stead in their subsequent house-to-house visiting. In Marylebone the infant mortality has of recent yearsbeen conspicuously low for a metropolitan district, so that with the mayor’s generous offer and the active operation of the Health Society we shall look for some really remarkable reduction in the annual death-rate among babies in this district.
M. Bertrand has, however, discovered that the of the ooffea Mauretiana, cultivated in the part of Guinea which is French territory, contains no more than 0’7 gramme of caffeine per kilogramme. He therefore argues that the proportion of caffeine in the bean as well as the fact of its complete absence in certain species ought to be included amorg the botanical characteristics of the coffee plant. In his two articles on the subject published in the Omnptes Rendu8 M. Bertrand makes no references either to the actual date of his important discovery or to any analyses made by other chemists, but on the paragraph in THE LANCET coming to the knowledge of Herr Heinrich Trillich, a chemist in Munich, he wrote to us inclosing a reprint of an article which appeared in vol. iv. of the Ze2tsonrift fur bffentlic7te OJwmie. In this comwhich is " Ueber Kaffee mit thtdnenheaded munication, Bohnen" with Coffee förmigen (On Tear-shaped Beans), Herr Trillich states that in 1892, 1894, and 1896 he received from the island of Bourbon samples of the so-called "cafe marron" which grows wild there and is used by the natives but is not exported. He says that the beans are decidedly of the nature of coffee (entsohieden Kaifeeoohnen) but of a somewhat globular form (tear-shaped). When roasted they behave like ordinary coffee, give off the aroma of coffee, and yield an infusion strongly resembling coffee but of a disagreeable harsh taste. He found that this café marron contained no caffeine. He suggests that it may OUR CONCEPTION OF HEALTH AND DISEASE. be the produce of wild plants of eoffea Bourbonioa. The THE difficulty of constructing a definition of health or of island of Bourbon, more commonly called Reunion, is a its in miles the Indian Ocean about 480 east French possession contrary, disease, has often forcibly presented itself tolecturers on medicine and to writers of text-books of of Madagascar.
gramme.
produce
____
-
it is true that these terms represent ultimate ideas, like pleasure and pain, and admit of nG’ definition-a process which usually consists in referring a concept to a wider and better-known class in which it is included. Still, attempts have to be made to evade the difficulty and to arrive at a working description at all events. The problem has recently been faced once more, this time by Professor Sheridan Delepine; and his attempt is of the’ greater interest in that it is embodied in an address which was written some 20 years ago and was only recently published with a few alterations needed to bring it up to date. He proceeds on the most hopeful line-namely, the application of the theory of evolution to matters medical. At the basis of this theory lies the conception of life as the interaction between a living organism and its environment, and from this it follows that all disease, whether apparently hereditary or visibly acquired, is due to the influence of outside factors acting either on the individual affected ’or on his ancestors.Health,, then, consists in a sort.
pathology. Probably
INFANT MORTALITY IN MARYLEBONE. FOLLOWING the precedent set by Mr. Alderman Broadbent, during his year of office as Mayor of Huddersfield, in offering a present of .J2.1to the parents of each child who survived the first year of life, Sir Thomas BrookeHitching, the Mayor of Marylebone, has made a similar offer to the residents of his borough who are on the Burgess registry and whose weekly earnings do not exceed 2. The Huddersfield scheme has worked remarkably well in reducing the infant mortality in the northern centre
and
there
is
no
reason
to
suppose
that
in
Marylebone the same incentive to care in the rearing of infants will give less excellent results, provided that the
ing
same care be taken in the house-to-house visitand in the dissemination of the requisite knowledge.
1 Comptes Rendus de l’Académie des Sciences, Paris, 1901, vol. cxxxii., p. 162; 1905, vol. cxli., p. 209; Bulletin de la Société Chimique, 1901, third series, vol. xxv., p. 379.