Medicinal Discourses over Chinese Tea in Revolutionary America

This paper examines the tea controversy on the eve of the American Revolution from a global perspective. It argues that both patriots and loyalists voiced their opinions regarding tea using medicinal narratives. Detractors of tea insisted that this beverage was a baneful weed that harmed American bodies and body politic. Supporters insisted that tea’s curative power was important to their mental and physical well-being. While their stances differed significantly, both sides drew from a body of knowledge about tea’s healing properties that were transferred from China via Europe.

Philadelphia Quakers were reluctant to forgo tea following the Boston Tea Party because they cherished tea’s nourishing effects for body and mind. Being an integral part of a transatlantic network, they relied on people like British physician John Fothergill to provide information about tea’s medicinal efficacy. Fothergill synthesized information obtained by EIC naturalists in China to share with his audiences the medicinal properties of Bohea and Hyson tea. He also obtained seeds from China to cultivate tea plants in his botanical garden and considered transplanting them to North America.

Radical leaders who denounced tea as a pernicious drug also derived their information from Chinese sources. In 1773, Benjamin Rush and Thomas Young dismissed tea as a pernicious drug in their newspaper articles and public speeches to dissuade Americans from consuming this beverage. They referenced such European authors as Samuel Tissot, Engelbert Kaempfer, and William Cullen. It was not through experiments that these authors reached their conclusions. Instead, they relied on Chinese knowledge communicated to them orally or through printed texts. Kaempfer, for example, stayed in Japan for decades in the late 1600s and learned much from Chinese physicians and pharmaceutical treatises such as Bencao gangmu [Systematic Materia Medica] about tea’s health benefits and side effects.