A case with which the serious Swedes became the laughingstock of the European scientific community.

Unfaithful and toxic coffee

The entry of coffee in Europe was not without controversy. Before reaching the old continent, the drink first became popular in the Islamic world and Christian Europe suspected everything that came from the territories of Islam.

In fact, it is said that it was Pope Clement VIII himself who would have imparted his definitive blessing to coffee when he stated that it was so delicious that the infidels could not be left exclusive of their use.

Other pruritus with the coffee came from what was supposedly poisonous and one of the great enemies of the drink was King Gustav III of Sweden.

Cufflinks used

Gustav III came to the Swedish throne in 1771 and is remembered for his absolutism, his love of art and his hatred of coffee, a product he considered toxic and taxed with high taxes. But outside the opinion of his monarch, the Swedes began to get excited about the aromatic drink and then the king set out to demonstrate with an experiment its poisonous properties.

Two identical twins were in jail, awaiting the execution of their death sentences and the king thought they were the ideal candidates to prove his theory. Gustav III annulled the sentences to the capital punishment of the twins, condemning them to life imprisonment, on condition that they were put under an experiment: as of that moment, one of them would take 3 glasses of coffee to the day and the other 3 of tea .

The tea was also considered harmful, but the king thought that the coffee was so bad, that the prisoner who would be given that drink would soon fall dead. There are no records of the start date of the experiment; all that is known is that it began after 1771.

The king falls dead

Who fell unexpectedly dead was the king, when on March 29, 1792 was shot at point-blank range in a night of masks at the Stockholm Opera. By that time, the twins were still drinking tea and coffee without incident.

If the king had had a long life, he would have taken a dislike to his experiment. Even the two doctors Gustav III appointed to supervise the case died of natural causes before the twins. In fact, one of the few things that is known about the end of the experiment is that the coffee drinker died at 83, after having seen his brother leave. Since then, the case is mockingly called the "first Swedish clinical trial"