ABSTRACT
A tract on the botanical, culinary and medical uses of coffee, opportunistically published during the plague scare of 1720–1. The tract reviews the extant scholarship on coffee and the coffee tree amongst travellers and botanists: the research is up to date, but undistinguished, and is aimed at a popular audience (as demonstrated by the low quality of the scholarly machinery (title, page numbers)). The tract is dedicated to Parliament (both the Commons and Lords), and pretends to have a public utility in a period of medical crisis. The book was published in 1721 by the bookseller and stationer William Mears (fl. 1700, d. 1758) at the Lamb without Temple Bar. Bradley had printed an earlier but undated thirty-page duodecimo edition of the book in 1715 entitled A Short Historical Account of Coffee; containing the most remarkable observations of the greatest men of Europe concerning it (London, Em. Matthews, [1715]), advertised in The Post Man for 28–30 April 1715. Robert Balle presented the Royal Society with a copy at a meeting of the society on 28 April 1715, but despite this, the tract may not have been intended for wide circulation, as no more than two copies survive. In 1721, Bradley used the occasion of a public health scare about plague to reissue the book, slightly revised, and with a new preface addressing coffee’s supposed efficacy against plague. Bradley offered a further description of the glass-houses used to cultivate coffee-bushes at Amsterdam and Hoxton in A General Treatise of Husbandry and Gardening (London, T. Woodward, 1726), pp. 348–9; and an account of the Dutch use of stratagem to obtain a coffee-tree in Yemen in The Weekly Miscellany, 9 (12 September 1727). Richard Bradley (d. 1732) was a botanist and horticultural writer, elected to the Royal Society in 1712, published in the Philosophical Transactions in 1716, and appointed the first professor of botany at Cambridge in 1724. These achievements cannot mask the element of roguery in his character: he was constantly 166quarrelling with his botanical friends and enemies, and was repeatedly forced to travel in Europe to escape his creditors, where he fraudulently practiced medicine, often under adopted names. In Cambridge, where he had pretended to have the support of Dr William Sherard (acting in ‘a clandestine and fraudulent manner’, according to Nichols), he had made great promises to establish a botanic garden at his own expense, in the manner of Sherard at Oxford. Soon after his election to the chair, he became the subject of considerable scandal: his unsuccessful competitors alleging that he was ignorant of Latin and Greek, and attacking his performance of his teaching duties. He died in 1732 in London, having married a wealthy widow, who nonetheless claimed to be penniless when he died. He published a great many works of popular and practical botany, such as New Improvements of Planting and Gardening (London, W. Mears, 1717), A Treatise concerning the manner of Fallowing the ground (Edinburgh, Robert Fleming and Co., 1724), A Survey of Ancient Husbandry and Gardening, collected from Cato, Varro, Columella (London, B. Motte, 1725).
