Tea, Sage, Sugar and Sleep

John Wesley is remembered chiefly as the great eighteenth-century evangelist whose preaching helped to awaken Britain and gave rise to the Methodist movement. Yet Wesley’s interests extended far beyond the pulpit. Throughout his long life he maintained a remarkable interest in medicine, diet, exercise, mental wellbeing and the prevention of disease. He read medical works, treated the poor, experimented upon himself, established dispensaries and eventually produced one of the most successful popular medical books of the eighteenth century. Even the humble cup of tea came under his scrutiny.

Wesley Gives Up Tea

Tea had become increasingly fashionable in eighteenth-century Britain, but Wesley came to regard it with considerable suspicion. His objection was partly the result of personal experience. Wesley recalled that while a young man at Oxford he had begun to suffer from a trembling or shaking of the hand. He eventually associated the problem with his tea drinking, observing that the shaking was worse after breakfast and appeared to cease when he abstained from tea for several days. From this experience, and from what he believed he had observed in others, Wesley concluded that tea could injure the nerves.

By 1746 he had resolved to abandon it. His opposition was not casual. Wesley became convinced that habitual tea drinking contributed to nervous complaints and other disorders. Writing later about nervous illness, he declared that strong tea could still make his hand shake so severely that he could scarcely write. His conclusions would not satisfy modern medical science, but they reveal something characteristic of Wesley: he was intensely observant of his own health and willing to alter his habits when he believed experience justified doing so.

A Letter to a Friend, Concerning Tea

In 1748 Wesley published A Letter to a Friend, Concerning Tea, setting out the case for abstinence. His argument was broader than the simple assertion that tea disagreed with him personally. He believed that excessive tea drinking was contributing to what he described as disorders of a “nervous kind”. Tea, in Wesley’s estimation, was therefore not the harmless necessity that fashionable society supposed it to be.

Yet his objections were moral and economic as well as medical. Tea cost money, and Wesley believed Christians ought to consider whether money spent upon unnecessary luxuries might be better employed in relieving the poor. Self-denial was not merely a means of improving bodily health; it was a Christian discipline. “If the whole saved were ever so little,” he argued, even the smallest amount became significant when it was saved “for God and your brethren’s sake”.

Wesley consequently urged his readers not merely to ask, “Do I enjoy this?” but rather, “Is it wholesome? Is it necessary? And might the money be better employed?” This was thoroughly Wesleyan reasoning. Health, economy, charity and Christian self-denial belonged together.

No Black Tea for Mr Wesley

Giving up ordinary tea did not mean that Wesley abandoned hot drinks altogether. He recommended several alternatives made from inexpensive English herbs. Among them were sage, mint, green balm and pennyroyal. His advice was to infuse only enough of the herb to colour the water slightly. He also suggested mixtures of different herbs, cocoa and other inexpensive alternatives. If none agreed with the individual, he reluctantly allowed that weak green tea might be tried again.

Sage was therefore one of Wesley’s preferred substitutes for conventional tea. What we would now call a herbal infusion offered, in his judgement, a cheaper and healthier alternative to imported tea. His affection for sage was not confined to the teapot.

Sage as Medicine

In 1747 Wesley published the work that would become his most celebrated contribution to popular medicine: Primitive Physick: or, An Easy and Natural Method of Curing Most Diseases. Wesley had been interested in anatomy and medicine for many years. His concern became particularly practical when he encountered poor people who could not afford professional medical treatment. He therefore sought remedies that were inexpensive, readily available and simple enough for ordinary households to use.

Sage naturally found a place among them. For stomach complaints Wesley recommended preparations involving sage among the numerous simple remedies gathered in Primitive Physick. This reflected the broader eighteenth-century use of familiar garden herbs as domestic medicines. The same plant that could replace the expensive tea leaf might therefore also serve in Wesley’s household medicine chest. The connection is important. Wesley was not advocating exotic health products available only to the wealthy. His preference was generally for remedies that ordinary people could obtain and administer themselves.

A Rather More Unusual Cure for Stomach Ache

Not every remedy in Primitive Physick has aged equally well. Some sound surprisingly sensible to modern ears. Others decidedly do not. Among the more memorable treatments associated with Wesley’s medical handbook was the extraordinary recommendation involving a young dog: for certain abdominal complaints, a warm puppy was to be laid upon the stomach. The unfortunate puppy was, in effect, being employed as a living hot-water bottle.

Such a prescription inevitably raises a smile today, but it should be judged within the medical world in which Wesley lived. Eighteenth-century medicine contained treatments far more dangerous than warm animals and herbal infusions. Bloodletting, purging and other aggressive treatments remained commonplace.

Indeed, one of the striking features of Wesley’s medical thinking was his preference for simple and comparatively accessible remedies. Modern scholarship has consequently noted that, notwithstanding some decidedly strange prescriptions, aspects of his emphasis upon hygiene, exercise, diet and prevention were unusually progressive for his age.

Preventing Illness Rather Than Merely Treating It

Perhaps the most modern feature of Primitive Physick is found not in its hundreds of remedies but in Wesley’s general philosophy of health. He did not believe that people should wait until serious illness arrived before thinking about their bodies. He advocated what we would now describe as preventive health. Fresh air mattered. Cleanliness mattered. Exercise mattered. Food mattered. Sleep mattered. Moderation mattered.

Wesley himself practised an extraordinarily active lifestyle. His itinerant ministry involved constant travelling, much of it on horseback, together with preaching, reading, writing and correspondence on a formidable scale. Maintaining physical health was therefore not merely theoretical for him. His ministry depended upon considerable bodily endurance.

Primitive Physick consequently offered advice for preserving health as well as remedies for restoring it. That distinction makes Wesley particularly interesting. He was not simply compiling an eighteenth-century medicine cupboard. He was encouraging people to think about how everyday habits affected their long-term health.

Later medical historians have therefore described him as, in certain respects, a pioneer of preventive medicine. His treatments cannot simply be transferred into modern practice, but his underlying insistence that lifestyle affects health is considerably more familiar to us.

Body, Mind and Soul

Wesley’s understanding of health also extended beyond the purely physical. For him, a human being could not easily be divided into unrelated compartments. Physical, emotional and spiritual conditions interacted with one another. A troubled mind might affect the body, while bodily illness could weigh heavily upon the mind and spirit. Spiritual wellbeing was therefore fundamental to Wesley’s conception of a healthy life.

This did not mean that he regarded every illness as the consequence of spiritual failure. Rather, his Christian understanding of humanity led him to seek the wellbeing of the whole person. His concern for salvation did not prevent him caring about bodily suffering; it compelled him to care about it. This conviction appeared repeatedly in his ministry among the poor. Wesley did not consider preaching the Gospel an excuse for ignoring hunger, sickness or distress. Works of mercy accompanied evangelism.

Writing to Alexander Knox in 1778, Wesley expressed the principle beautifully when he spoke of Christ as the “Great Physician” who could “heal soul and body together”. His theology of health was consequently holistic long before that expression became fashionable.

Medicine for the Poor

There was also a powerful social dimension to Wesley’s medical interests. Professional medical treatment could be prohibitively expensive for the poor. Wesley had seen suffering among people who possessed neither the money nor the connections necessary to obtain adequate treatment. In 1747 he began providing medical assistance to the poor in London, aided by an apothecary and an experienced surgeon.

The demand was enormous. This experience helped to shape Primitive Physick. The book was deliberately practical. Wesley wanted ordinary families to possess a collection of inexpensive treatments for common illnesses without being entirely dependent upon costly physicians.

The book contained hundreds of remedies and recommendations covering a remarkable range of complaints. Some were derived from traditional medicine, some from contemporary medical authorities, and others from Wesley’s own experience and observations. His purpose was practical Christian philanthropy: useful knowledge should not belong exclusively to the wealthy.

The Question of Sugar and Slavery

Wesley’s thinking about what people consumed eventually acquired another moral dimension. He became an outspoken opponent of the slave trade. His Thoughts upon Slavery, published in 1774, denounced the trade in uncompromising terms, and in his final years he supported the growing abolitionist movement. His last known letter, written only days before his death, encouraged William Wilberforce to persevere in the struggle.

Sugar presented eighteenth-century Christians with a particularly uncomfortable problem because much of the sugar consumed in Britain came from Caribbean plantations dependent upon enslaved labour. As abolitionism gathered strength, refusing slave-produced sugar became a practical form of protest. Wesley encouraged opposition to the slave trade, and the tradition of Methodists refusing sugar in their tea became sufficiently strong that abstention from sugar was remembered in some Methodist communities as being done “on account of Mr Wesley”.

There is an interesting irony here. Wesley’s early campaign against tea in the 1740s and the later abolitionist campaign against slave-grown sugar belonged to different stages of his life and should not simply be treated as a single campaign. Indeed, Wesley himself at one stage drank hot sugar-and-water as an alternative to tea. His explicit and sustained attack upon slavery came considerably later. Nevertheless, both concerns reveal a common feature of Wesley’s character: consumption was a moral matter. What a Christian purchased could affect someone else.

Did Wesley Never Drink Tea Again?

There is one further qualification to the familiar picture of Wesley as the great enemy of tea. His abstinence was not permanent. Although his 1748 pamphlet vigorously advocated giving tea up, evidence indicates that Wesley later returned to drinking it. What remained consistent was his conviction that strong tea could aggravate his own trembling and contribute to nervous complaints.

Thus it would be too simple to say that Wesley never drank ordinary tea again. During his strict anti-tea period, however, he certainly rejected it and deliberately recommended herbal alternatives such as sage and mint. The sage infusion has therefore become an appealing symbol of Wesley’s wider approach to health: inexpensive, simple, readily available and supposedly beneficial.

A Medical Bestseller

Primitive Physick proved astonishingly successful. It first appeared in 1747 and was repeatedly revised and enlarged. By Wesley’s death in 1791 it had passed through twenty-three editions. It continued to be published long after his death, eventually reaching dozens of editions.

For a man remembered principally as preacher, theologian and founder of Methodism, the popularity of his medical handbook is remarkable. Indeed, it became one of the most successful publications of Wesley’s lifetime. Its popularity tells us something important about eighteenth-century Britain. Medical knowledge was desperately wanted by ordinary people, especially when professional treatment was beyond their means. Wesley offered something understandable, inexpensive and practical.

Not everything he offered was correct. Some remedies were harmless. Some probably provided genuine relief. Others were ineffective, and a number appear distinctly alarming when judged by modern standards. No responsible reader today should use Primitive Physick as a substitute for evidence-based medicine. Yet merely laughing at its stranger prescriptions misses its historical importance.

Ahead of His Time and Very Much a Man of His Time

John Wesley was both. He was a man of the eighteenth century, working with the medical knowledge, assumptions and folk remedies available to him. His belief that tea was a major cause of nervous disorders, like many of the remedies in Primitive Physick, would not withstand modern clinical scrutiny. Yet other aspects of his thinking seem strikingly familiar. Eat sensibly. Exercise regularly. Get sufficient sleep. Keep clean. Seek fresh air. Avoid excess. Pay attention to mental wellbeing. Do not wait until illness becomes severe before thinking about health. Make useful medical knowledge accessible. Consider the ethical consequences of what you consume. And recognise that emotional, physical and spiritual wellbeing are intimately connected.

Those principles are considerably harder to dismiss. For Wesley, caring for the body was ultimately an aspect of Christian stewardship. The body was neither to be worshipped nor neglected. Health provided strength for labour, service and the fulfilment of Christian duty. That helps explain why the same John Wesley who crossed Britain preaching repentance, justification by faith and holiness could also devote pages to exercise, stomach complaints, herbal remedies and the merits of sage. The subjects were not as unrelated in his mind as they may appear to ours. Wesley wanted men and women to be made whole.

His medicine cabinet may sometimes make the modern reader smile, particularly when a puppy is prescribed for a troublesome stomach, but beneath the peculiarities of eighteenth-century medicine lay a serious and enduring conviction: spiritual health, mental wellbeing and bodily health all deserved attention. And when Wesley sat down for a hot drink during the strictest period of his campaign against conventional tea, there was a fair chance that the famous Methodist preacher was not drinking black tea at all. He was drinking sage.