MEDICINAL EFFECTS. 265 



coffee as a beverage, in order to keep the system healthy 

 and render it less liable to an attack of the disease, with 

 the most beneficial and gratifying results. That they 

 ** builded better than they knew " has since been conclu- 

 sively proven by Sudentz, who in detailing a series of 

 experiments in which he has determined the powerful 

 influence of coffee infusions of varying strength upon the 

 growth of the different forms of pathogenic and non- 

 pathogenic micro-organisms. The variety of coffee used 

 in these experiments was the finest Java although good 

 and bad coffee was afterwards found to effect precisely 

 similar results the infusions being made by adding from 

 10 to 30 parts of coffee to from 70 to 90 parts of boiling 

 water. The coffee was first freshly roasted, ground fine 

 and then covered with the boiling water, the infusion 

 thus prepared being placed in a closed flask, put in a 

 hot water bath for about ten minutes and next filtered 

 through a sterilized filter. The infusion thus produced 

 is used in the making of a gelatinous compound, both 

 directly and in part, until a nutrient gelatine was prepared 

 from it. With this as a " menstruum " the various forms 

 oi fungi and other forms of micro-organisms were inoc- 

 ulated with the object of determining the possibility of 

 their growth or propagation in such a medium, but in 

 other cases the organisms were added directly to the 

 coffee alone in infusions of varying strength and after dif- 

 ferent periods of time inoculations were made from these 

 infusions into other nutrient media. By this method he 

 found that the forms o^ fungi experimented with showed 

 more or less growth in the coffee gelatine and that the 

 abundance of the growth was in many cases distinctly 

 less than in the former media. The other organisms 

 which he used for his experiments were the phyogenes 

 aureus, prodigiosus, erisipelous, the germ of anthrax or 



