Do you have favorite home remedies? Are you impressed when you hear that people for generations used some combination of plants to cure some illness? Do you, on hearing of a traditional medical treatment, assume that it was years of careful observation that led people to believe in its efficacy?
I was cured of this by reading an anthropologist's careful collection of Cherokee health secrets. Boil onions in water, I read, and soak your feet in it to cure smallpox. I'm pretty sure that doesn't work. Then there's the list of herbs that cure colds. There are dozens of concoctions rumored to achieve this end, and all of them will -- because a cold will last seven days if you don't treat it, and a week if you do.
So we may not be impressed by the news that, from the 15th to the 20th centuries, chocolate was widely used for medicinal purposes.
Chocolate was believed, by Europeans and by Americans, to have health-giving properties. While it has been prescribed for everything from asthma to whooping cough, chocolate was particularly treasured for its ability to strengthen people. It was supposed to create alertness and a sense of well-being, and to help people think clearly.
The Aztecs recommended it to give courage to the faint of heart. Renaissance scholars considered it a cure for fevers and weakness, those of the Enlightenment suggested that it was ideal for people engaged in mental work, doctors of the Victorian era carried it in their satchels to treat fainting and malaise. Red Cross nurses gave cocoa to malnourished children during the Depression, and that may have been its last medicinal use before people forgot entirely that it was a cure and began to think of it strictly as a treat.
Recent research confirms that chocolate increases cerebral blood flow -- that is, the flow of blood to the brain. It improves performance in math, improves memory, and (in studies of rats, as well as of humans) shows promise as a treatment for dementia. It has anti-inflammatory properties which researchers in geriatrics credit for observed associations between chocolate consumption and increased well-being in the elderly. It appears to cure depression in rats (though I'm not quite sure how researchers can tell how cheerful rats are).
No one has yet suggested that it is useful for smallpox. However, as we move on into the second decade of the century, many of us are feeling a bit faint of heart and could use some general strengthening.
And chocolate is bound to be more pleasant than a boiled onion foot bath.
