In his medical textbook, AL-Haiwi (The Continent), Rhazes describes the nature and effects of a plant named ‘bunn’ and a beverage named ‘buncham,’ and what he says about the beverage’s effects is at least consistent with a reference to coffee.
The oldest extant accounts of coffee roasting date to the writings of the famous Islamic physician Ibn Sina, traditionally referred to in English-language texts by his Latinized name ‘Avicenna’. Avicenna’s praises of coffee were published in Arabic circa 1000 AD and translated into Latin circa 1200 AD.
Ibn Sina wrote of a average that ‘fortified the members, cleanses the skin and dries up the humidities that under it, and gives an excellent smell to all the body’.
And along with the coffee bean itself came the institution of the coffeehouse, which had become an important meeting place and source of news in the Arab World, William Biddulph, an English traveler, had noted in 1609 that ‘their Coffee houses are more common than Ale-houses in England…. If there be any news it is talked of there’.
Leonhard Rauwolf a German physician botanist, also traveler and he was the first European to write a description of coffee, which he saw prepared by the Turks in Aleppo in 1573.
Early writings about coffee
