Page 42 - @ccess 3 Reader´s Book

Usage du caphé, du thé, et du chocolate (1671). Dufour, “from
the oven”, may be another witty pseudonym (some speculate
for physician and archeologist Jacob Spon, whom others
claim was Dufour’s friend), as the drinks were served hot.

Raw materials from Arabia, America, and Asia thus entered
the French medical literature as a new drug group. Dufour
did not have the language of caffeine, but grasped that their
common denominator is an ability to stimulate and fortify.
Beyond this shrewd scientific insight into the behavior of
coffee, chocolate, and tea, the collected works also force the
idea of cultural comparison. Dufour shows that these widely
dispersed lands with vastly different climates, flora, fauna,
peoples, and languages, nevertheless share the cultural
practice of boiling stimulants for medicinal purposes.

If the idea of a small world seems obvious now, it was not
then. Since the Age of Discovery, it had been commonplace
to depict the world as a wide rectangle with each of the
Four Continents at an angle: Europe, Africa, the Americas,
and Asia. Early visual traditions represented peoples of
these lands racially, painted with different colored skin, or
allegorically, flanked with elephants, hunting bows,
and parasols. A frontispiece added to Dufour’s 1685 edition
participates in the visual tradition of the continents but does
not follow the same logic of depicting difference. Instead,
it follows the logic of the treatise: to relate the global areas
associated with coffee, tea, and chocolate through their
similar habits. Accordingly, the frontispiece pictures men who
are racialized and dressed to evoke the Middle East, Asia,
and Mesoamerica sitting in a room around a table enjoying a
drink together. The world suddenly looked quite small.

The Middle Eastern figure, in Ottoman dress, wears a
decorated turban and beard; the Chinese figure balances in
lotus position under a conical hat, and the Mexican (as Dufour
identifies him), stands in mid-stride with a bow, wearing only
feathers and gold. Each of them holds a visibly steaming

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