Tea as Medicine: Cures, Poisons and Legends from Lu Yu to Gandhi

In ancient China, people boiled tea leaves with herbs and even onions, and drank the brew as a tonic. It was the Tang dynasty writer Lu Yu who made it fashionable to drink tea on its own, for its taste. Lu Yu lived in the eighth century and wrote The Tea Classic, which a 2015 essay on our blog called “the first bible of tea.”

Peter Keen, writing for our blog in 2016, pointed out that writing about tea goes back well over two thousand years, and that what tea does for the body has been a theme of it from the very beginning. Tea “had long been part of Chinese and Japanese practice and of the comprehensive Ayurveda tradition of Indian medicine” before Europe had heard of it. That long habit of reaching for tea as a remedy is the root of most of the claims you read today.

The legend of the eyelids

Tea’s oldest health story is a legend, not history, and it is worth telling as one. In the version on our blog, the Zen Buddhist teacher Bodhidharma, known in Japan as Daruma, fell asleep while meditating. Angry with himself, he cut off his eyelids so that it would not happen again and threw them on the ground, and from there sprang the first tea plants. Bodhidharma is still drawn as a wide-eyed, meditating man.

Our old mythbusting article told the same tale about the Buddha himself, and used it to explain why tea keeps people awake. The real reason is plainer: tea contains caffeine, and how much varies with the leaf and the brewing; see Caffeine in tea. The legend explains why tea became part of Buddhist practice; it does not explain the chemistry.

When tea reached Europe in the 17th century, buyers often went to an apothecary rather than a grocer, because it was sold as an herbal tonic. Our old Tea 101 article listed what apothecaries sold it for: skin ailments, stomach complaints, sleepiness and memory loss, among other things.

Britain came late. As Peter Keen noted, the very first recorded advertisement for tea in England highlights that apothecaries recommend it, and by then the Dutch and French “were already very active in adding it to the medicine chest.” Britain began importing tea a century after the Portuguese and fifty years after the Dutch.

The 1658 advertisement and 200 cups a day

The first printed advertisement for tea in Britain, in 1658, promised that it would cure or prevent scurvy, griping of the guts, hot livers, and stones and gravels. The full list also included “lipitude distillations.” By the late 1660s, Dutch physicians were recommending as many as 200 cups a day as “not too much.”

None of it was true, and none of it was tested. For the wider story, see The history of tea.

From the medicine chest to the breakfast table

Tea did not stay in the medicine chest for long. Until the late 17th century, English households drank ale with breakfast; Queen Anne (1665 to 1714) reportedly took tea with the first meal of the day instead, and by the mid-1700s tea was a customary breakfast drink.

The morning cup became so British that it got its own machine. In 1891 Samuel Rowbottom applied for the first UK patent for an automatic tea maker, and by the early 20th century a machine called the Teasmade, an alarm clock that boiled the water and brewed a pot by the bed, had become a fixture in many homes.

A 2015 essay on our blog put tea’s British reputation in one line: “If penicillin had been discovered in the 1700s, tea would have been called ‘British penicillin’.”

Exaggeration ran the other way too. Peter Keen collected the attacks for our blog in 2016, tongue firmly in cheek, but with a promise that “every single instance and quote in this blog piece is real.”

• 1744: the novelist and publisher Eliza Haywood warned that tea was “the utter Destruction of all Oeconomy,” “the Bane of good Housewifry, and the Source of Idleness.”
• 1820s: the English reformer William Cobbett called tea a “corrosive and gnawing” poison and urged that every house be stocked instead with “its good and wholesome beer,” arguing that tea cost a family more than the 4 to 10 pints of beer a day he said it needed.
• 1872: a pioneer of occupational medicine called tea drinking “a form of animal indulgence” as “pernicious as any beer-swilling or gin-drinking in the world.”
• 1880s: the Dean of Bangor claimed that tea, taken three or four times a day, made people feel weak, so that “the tea-kettle went before the gin bottle.”
• 1910: The New York Times described tea as having “the properties of a slow poison” and said it ranked “before alcohol as an enemy of the public health.”

Cobbett even offered what he called “undeniable proof.” A hog fed on the malt used for brewing beer, he wrote, would produce fifteen times its weight in bacon; fed on leftover tea leaves, it would die in about a week.

“Tea poisoning” and 15 cups a day

Coroners’ reports through the following century listed “tea abuse” and “tea poisoning” as causes of death. In Ireland, worry that tea drinking was linked to a rise in insanity led to a special inquiry by medical authorities and asylums in 1894. The concern was greatest among poor rural families, where pots of cheap tea stewed all day on the hob and one person might drink more than 15 cups a day. The cures and the poisons were both about strong, stewed, cheap tea drunk in huge amounts, which is nothing like a few well-brewed cups.

Why coffee took the blame for caffeine

Coffee, not tea, drew most of the scientific suspicion. The 2015 essay on our blog notes that homeopathy was started in Germany in 1796 by Samuel Hahnemann, who believed coffee and caffeine were major health problems, and that his view led to serious scientific study of coffee and its brewing. “Although tea contains caffeine, it somehow escaped the opprobrium,” and tea brewing stayed much as it had been for 200 years.

Gandhi turns against tea

Mahatma Gandhi, once a tea lover, turned against it. Throughout his life he “strongly denounced tea as ‘grass’” and, classing it with coffee and cocoa, “deemed it ‘harmful’.” His objection was moral and dietary rather than scientific, and it shows how easily a drink becomes a symbol.

The honest position sits between them, and it is less exciting than either. Tea is a drink. It contains caffeine and a great many plant compounds that scientists find interesting, and it has been studied for decades without any claim that it cures or prevents a disease being confirmed.

The 2015 essay on our blog had a theory about why the myths lasted so long: coffee was picked apart by scientists from the 1790s, while it “took decades before tea was properly scientifically analyzed,” and stories fill the space where knowledge is missing. The same pattern shows up today, in promises on packets that no one has tested.

The claims have simply changed costume. The 1658 advertisement promised to cure “stones and gravels”; three and a half centuries later, our own old Tea 101 article said green tea “prevents the formation of kidney stones.” Both were wrong. Our main guide takes today’s claims one by one: heart health, blood pressure, diabetes, cancer and kidney stones.