The King of Sweden’s Coffee Experiment
For paid subscribers: Today, Sweden is famous for its love of coffee. But historically that hasn’t always been the case, and one particular ruler’s attempts to prove coffee’s harmful health impacts may have been the world’s first randomised controlled trial.
Did you know that coffee is really popular in Scandinavia? I’m joking, because of course you know that. The fact is impossible to escape. Finland, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden dominate lists of top coffee-consuming countries, while Sweden has a whole tradition, fika, a semi-mandatory daily break built around coffee.
Although today Sweden’s coffee culture is discussed in hushed, almost reverential terms—in 2015, Vice wrote that “Swedes do coffee culture better than anywhere else”, while Nescafé (?) notes on its website that “coffee is a way of life in Sweden”—the country’s royalty have historically had a much more complicated relationship with our favourite morning beverage.
King Frederick I, his successor, Adolf Frederick, and his son, Gustav III, all banned coffee at various times in the 18th and early 19th centuries. (This was not a particularly unusual approach: at around the same time, another Frederick, this time of Prussia, also tried to ban coffee, but settled on monopolising the roasting process and employed “coffee sniffers” to root out illegal coffee operations.)
Their reasons ranged from health concerns to economic pressures to attempted social control. But the tale I want to tell is that, at one point, Gustav III attempted to prove coffee’s harmfulness with an experiment. The story is both possibly apocryphal, and also, probably incorrectly, referred to as the first “randomised controlled trial” in medical history.
It does, however, tie into both the ruling classes’ historical mistrust of coffee, and also our modern fixation on coffee’s health properties. People, it turns out, have been concerned about this for quite some time.
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