6 ms·

Gustav III of Sweden's Coffee Experiment

103 points by mmastrac 7y ago

duxup 7y ago
>the tea drinker was the first to die, at age 83; For being condemned criminals it sounds like they were well cared for. Also what are the odds of finding condemned twins?
- vilhelm_s 7y ago
  Yeah, the cited pages don't seem to have any scholarly references, and one of them notes that "the authenticity of the story has been questioned", so I rather doubt it.
  - m_eiman 7y ago
    Sweden has been good at keeping public records of trials since far earlier than this experiment, so if it happened there are surely written records about it in an archive somewhere. Someone just needs to spend countless hours digging through archives…
- freepor 7y ago
  If they committed crimes together, not hard. If things like political crimes can be punished by death, even easier. If the king says “get me a pair of identical twins condemned to death” very easy. Go into a poor neighborhood, find a pair of twins and drag them in on an unsolved murder.
  - codeisawesome 7y ago
    That's such a nauseating reality.
emersonrsantos 7y ago
As with all drugs, it's not understood the paradoxical drug effects. Stimulants can make people sleepy, and the most potent of benzodiazepamines can make one more agressive. The endocrine system (also the immune system) is so complex and so full of variables and network effects that I think that science has a long way ahead for a precise scientific understanding of all the positive and negative effects of these drug categories.
- schoen 7y ago
  The first time that I ever tried yerba mate, I immediately fell asleep and slept for two to three hours! (Of course, I was also jetlagged, so I'm not sure whether it was actually an effect of the mate.)
  - mikorym 7y ago
    I've also experienced this both with mate and with coffee. The kind of sleep I have then is a sort of buzz sleep. Not necessarily full of dreams but similar to alcohol induced sleep. It's almost like sleep and activity are different things.
- skinkestek 7y ago
  This is a really weird topic! For example, I understand that Ritalin is used mostly as a stimulant and can be used to treat some cases of narcolepsy. But, according to a psychiatric doctor I spoke to, some people take it to help them fall asleep.
  - vegardx 7y ago
    It would surprise me if someone was able to sleep while influenced by stimulants. However, being on stimulants is very exhaustive for your body, and it temporarily stops the racing thoughts many people struggle with, even some time after taking it. I was having quite severe insomnia when I was younger and it all cleared around the time I was diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed stimulants. My insomnia doesn't seem to return when I'm on holidays or during weekends, periods which I usually don't take any medication. I asked my doctor about it, and he said it could be related, but it could also just be that I grew out of it, or any number of other reasons. He did say that some doctors was been experimenting with very low doses before going to bed with various degree of success. But it was a high risk that these people was suffer from some kind of undiagnosed variant of ADHD or another where insomnia typically is a comorbid disorder, like bipolar disorder.
    - barry-cotter 7y ago
toohotatopic 7y ago
No control group without tea or coffee?
- eitland 7y ago
  First: remember this is 250 or so years ago. Secondly you could say that everyone else was the control group as this king taxed tea and coffe and later outlawed at least coffee entirely. Edit: according to some sources it was his dad who first introduced steep taxes on tea and coffee.
- taneq 7y ago
  What kind of monster would suggest such a thing?! :P
eitland 7y ago
Thanks for posting, this brings back happy childhood memories : When I was a kid I used to follow my dad around the farm while he was milking the cows and doing farm work. He told a lot of stories like this (including the details about the doctors and the king dying first). Other times he told me about scientific studies he had read about etc. I can clearly remember him talking about omega3 in the mid 90ies, way before it became popular around here at least, because I remember asking a particular teacher about it. (He is now a teacher and enjoys it. I bet his students do too :-) Edit: I sent the link and he just replied. He read it in a book but sadly that book had less details, not more. Edit 2: FWIW here is a a page from nih.gov: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5355814/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5355814/ It to still light on the details though, and I don't have time to check all the references now.
antonvs 7y ago
> the date of death of the surviving coffee drinker is unknown. Apparently 3 pots of coffee a day makes you immortal.
- taneq 7y ago
  A simple application of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. After the third pot, you're so focused on your velocity that your location can no longer be determined to be in either the land of the living or the land of the dead.
_0ffh 7y ago
Reading it, I first thought: "Twin study, cool!" Then I thought, "What? Two experiments, but no control group? How disappointing!" :)
- grenoire 7y ago
  Considering the levels of consumption, you could assume that tea drinking is the control!
  - blaser-waffle 7y ago
    Three pots! That's almost Fry-Futurama level of consumption. Couple more pots and that test subject would have superpowers.
fapjacks 7y ago
This is quintessential Swedish sense of humor, the doctors AND the king dying before either of the twins.
- zepto 7y ago
  Questioning the value of coffee leads to death.
peter_d_sherman 7y ago
Great Article! You know, arguably (and I'm sure historians will differ on this!), but arguably, this is sort of like the Swedish version of Prohibition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_Stat...) -- except with Coffee, and except occuring in 1794, some 126 years or so before Prohibition... Ya know what I want to see? Somewhere, somewhere in obscure Swedish history, there has to be a version of the U.S.'s Boston Tea Party (1773) -- except occuring with, and solely on behalf of, you guessed it: Coffee... <g> (Oh yeah, and to any detractors out there in the HN Community without a sense of humor, feel free to downvote! I have enough HN Karma, I can take it! Hey, I thought it was funny! <g>) Hmm... Maybe there should be a political party, U.S. and/or Swedish... "The Coffee Party"... (ok, that was overstepping my bounds, yes, that would deserve a downvote! <g>)
kamakazizuru 7y ago
Twist: The coffee drinker is still alive
lacogubik 7y ago
This and more stories about origin of coffee was recently discussed in In our Time [1] podcast from BBC. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000c4x1 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000c4x1

103 points by mmastrac 7y ago

>the tea drinker was the first to die, at age 83; For being condemned criminals it sounds like they were well cared for. Also what are the odds of finding condemned twins?

vilhelm_s 7y ago
Yeah, the cited pages don't seem to have any scholarly references, and one of them notes that "the authenticity of the story has been questioned", so I rather doubt it.
- m_eiman 7y ago
  Sweden has been good at keeping public records of trials since far earlier than this experiment, so if it happened there are surely written records about it in an archive somewhere. Someone just needs to spend countless hours digging through archives…
freepor 7y ago
If they committed crimes together, not hard. If things like political crimes can be punished by death, even easier. If the king says “get me a pair of identical twins condemned to death” very easy. Go into a poor neighborhood, find a pair of twins and drag them in on an unsolved murder.
- codeisawesome 7y ago
  That's such a nauseating reality.

emersonrsantos 7y ago

As with all drugs, it's not understood the paradoxical drug effects. Stimulants can make people sleepy, and the most potent of benzodiazepamines can make one more agressive. The endocrine system (also the immune system) is so complex and so full of variables and network effects that I think that science has a long way ahead for a precise scientific understanding of all the positive and negative effects of these drug categories.

schoen 7y ago
The first time that I ever tried yerba mate, I immediately fell asleep and slept for two to three hours! (Of course, I was also jetlagged, so I'm not sure whether it was actually an effect of the mate.)
- mikorym 7y ago
  I've also experienced this both with mate and with coffee. The kind of sleep I have then is a sort of buzz sleep. Not necessarily full of dreams but similar to alcohol induced sleep. It's almost like sleep and activity are different things.
skinkestek 7y ago
This is a really weird topic! For example, I understand that Ritalin is used mostly as a stimulant and can be used to treat some cases of narcolepsy. But, according to a psychiatric doctor I spoke to, some people take it to help them fall asleep.
- vegardx 7y ago
  It would surprise me if someone was able to sleep while influenced by stimulants. However, being on stimulants is very exhaustive for your body, and it temporarily stops the racing thoughts many people struggle with, even some time after taking it. I was having quite severe insomnia when I was younger and it all cleared around the time I was diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed stimulants. My insomnia doesn't seem to return when I'm on holidays or during weekends, periods which I usually don't take any medication. I asked my doctor about it, and he said it could be related, but it could also just be that I grew out of it, or any number of other reasons. He did say that some doctors was been experimenting with very low doses before going to bed with various degree of success. But it was a high risk that these people was suffer from some kind of undiagnosed variant of ADHD or another where insomnia typically is a comorbid disorder, like bipolar disorder.
  - barry-cotter 7y ago

toohotatopic 7y ago

No control group without tea or coffee?

eitland 7y ago
First: remember this is 250 or so years ago. Secondly you could say that everyone else was the control group as this king taxed tea and coffe and later outlawed at least coffee entirely. Edit: according to some sources it was his dad who first introduced steep taxes on tea and coffee.
taneq 7y ago
What kind of monster would suggest such a thing?! :P

eitland 7y ago

Thanks for posting, this brings back happy childhood memories : When I was a kid I used to follow my dad around the farm while he was milking the cows and doing farm work. He told a lot of stories like this (including the details about the doctors and the king dying first). Other times he told me about scientific studies he had read about etc. I can clearly remember him talking about omega3 in the mid 90ies, way before it became popular around here at least, because I remember asking a particular teacher about it. (He is now a teacher and enjoys it. I bet his students do too :-) Edit: I sent the link and he just replied. He read it in a book but sadly that book had less details, not more. Edit 2: FWIW here is a a page from nih.gov: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5355814/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5355814/ It to still light on the details though, and I don't have time to check all the references now.

antonvs 7y ago

> the date of death of the surviving coffee drinker is unknown. Apparently 3 pots of coffee a day makes you immortal.

taneq 7y ago
A simple application of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. After the third pot, you're so focused on your velocity that your location can no longer be determined to be in either the land of the living or the land of the dead.

_0ffh 7y ago

Reading it, I first thought: "Twin study, cool!" Then I thought, "What? Two experiments, but no control group? How disappointing!" :)

grenoire 7y ago
Considering the levels of consumption, you could assume that tea drinking is the control!
- blaser-waffle 7y ago
  Three pots! That's almost Fry-Futurama level of consumption. Couple more pots and that test subject would have superpowers.

fapjacks 7y ago

This is quintessential Swedish sense of humor, the doctors AND the king dying before either of the twins.

zepto 7y ago
Questioning the value of coffee leads to death.

peter_d_sherman 7y ago

Great Article! You know, arguably (and I'm sure historians will differ on this!), but arguably, this is sort of like the Swedish version of Prohibition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_Stat...) -- except with Coffee, and except occuring in 1794, some 126 years or so before Prohibition... Ya know what I want to see? Somewhere, somewhere in obscure Swedish history, there has to be a version of the U.S.'s Boston Tea Party (1773) -- except occuring with, and solely on behalf of, you guessed it: Coffee... <g> (Oh yeah, and to any detractors out there in the HN Community without a sense of humor, feel free to downvote! I have enough HN Karma, I can take it! Hey, I thought it was funny! <g>) Hmm... Maybe there should be a political party, U.S. and/or Swedish... "The Coffee Party"... (ok, that was overstepping my bounds, yes, that would deserve a downvote! <g>)

kamakazizuru 7y ago

Twist: The coffee drinker is still alive

lacogubik 7y ago

This and more stories about origin of coffee was recently discussed in In our Time [1] podcast from BBC. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000c4x1 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000c4x1