I suspect that we’ll never find a definitive explanation of how the proscribed “hot drinks” in D&C 89 came to be interpreted by the church as referring purely and solely to tea and coffee. Today, of course, that is the church’s official interpretation of what “hot drinks” means, but early in the history of the D&C that wasn’t entirely obvious.
In fact, in January 1838—almost five years after Joseph’s receipt of the revelation—prominent members of the church on the high council disagreed about whether the Word of Wisdom’s invocation of “hot drinks” referred to tea and coffee. During a high council meeting, W.W. Phelps said he had not broken the Word of Wisdom. Oliver Cowdery, by contrast, said he had drunk tea three times a day during the winter as a result of his poor health. David and John Whitmer piped in that they didn’t drink tea or coffee, but also that they didn’t consider either to be hot drinks as referred to in Joseph’s revelation.
That short colloquy tells us a number of things. It tells us first that within early in the history of D&C 89, church members had interpreted hot drinks as referring to (at least) tea and coffee. But it also tells us that prominent church members nonetheless drank them and that the idea that tea and coffee were prohibited was not universally accepted.
It looks like this ambiguity about the meaning of hot drinks persisted for at least another four years. But in May 1842, Hyrum Smith discoursed on the Word of Wisdom. He dedicated two sentences to hot drinks: “And again ‘hot drinks are not for the body, or belly;’ there are many who wonder what this can mean; whether it refers to tea, or coffee, or not. I say it does refer to tea, and coffee.” While he sets the definitive foundation here for the future treatment of tea and coffee, the fact that, even a decade after Joseph’s receipt of the revelation people had questions about what “hot drinks” meant suggests that it wasn’t an obvious reference. Rather, it had to be defined.
So where did this idea of hot drinks (whatever they are) being bad come from? Seventeen years ago (man, time flies!) Nate Oman posited that it may have come from the pre-germ theory idea of humors. Others have theorized that it represented a caution against the extremes of Thompsonian medicine (which apparently liked tea a lot) or the embrace of the theories of Sylvester Graham (who eschewed coffee and tea and also almost any pleasure—he wasn’t the guy you would want choosing a restaurant).
Curious, I did what any right-thinking person on the internet would do: I did a Google Ngram search. I then clicked on the 1800-1850 results. And the results were glorious.
The most on-point was an 1850 editorial in the Millennial Star by the editor of the Deseret News. And I confess that I don’t entirely follow the editor’s reasoning, but it reflects non-Mormon reasoning that we’ll look at it a minute. But basically, the editor argues that, while coffee and tea may be “narcotic poisons,” there’s an additional reason not to drink them: because they’re “HOT.”
Yes, in 1850, a church publication argued that hot drinks literally meant hot drinks. Why? This is where I don’t follow entirely, but he says that hot water makes animal substances elastic; rawhide, leather, and meat(!), when immersed in hot water, can be bent into almost any shape. But it doesn’t have the ability to retain that shape until it cools (and perhaps dries).
Somehow, this heat-induced elasticity means that you could make a stomach into a saddle or a chain and, in any event, a stomach filled with hot water can’t do what a stomach is supposed to do. Instead, food in the stomach lies dormant, and eventually putrefies before the stomach cools off and can start digesting again. This putrefying food leads to headaches, uneasiness, fever, and, eventually, death. (Cold water, he notes, also weakens the “fluids of the system,” but it doesn’t relax the stomach in the same way hot water does. So while it’s better not to drink any water while you eat, if you’re going to drink, cold water is better than hot.)
He then launches into a metaphor of a sponge being stuck quickly into hot water and how it will absorb all of the water and lose the ability to absorb more. And while I can’t figure out how immersing a sponge in hot water differs from immersing it in cold, apparently it does.
Seriously, you need to read this piece. I’m going to give you the link again, just in case you skipped it the first time.
Now, it wasn’t just the Mormons inveighing against the problems of hot drinks; while it doesn’t appear to be universal, there was a fair amount written about the evils of drinks with a hot temperature. And the issues seem to largely fall into two categories: stomach problems and tooth problems.
In a, 1839 article in the Graham Journal of Health and Longevity, for example, we read that the stomach is a weak organ. (Seriously: apparently even “too much mental study” will mess with digestion.) Hot drinks “disturb the healthy action of the stomach, and create a diseased state of this vital organ.”
An 1829 article in the New England Medical Review and Journal came to a similar conclusion. Drinks, it says, should ideally be taken at body temperature. Hotter drinks may help people feel better temporarily, but eventually induce “an augmented suffering, by increasing the debility of the stomach, and rendering it less capable of after-digestion.” The article accepts, though, that there may be exceptions to this general rule.
The 1841 book A Treatise on Domestic Economy: For Young Ladies at Home bridges our gap between stomach and teeth. It asserts that if a person drinks hot drinks twice a day, “the teeth, throat, and stomach, are gradually debilitated.” The author believed that Americans’ habit of drinking hot drinks explained why tooth decay was more common among “American ladies” than Europeans. (Of course, these kinds of advice books could be inconsistent: in The Young Mother; or Management of Children in Regard to Health, the author acknowledges that hot drinks are bad for the stomach and cause tooth decay, but he believes that cold drinks are even more dangerous.)
And how do hot drinks damage teeth? Nature’s Own Book, written in 1835, has the answer for us. Substituting hot milk or watter for coffee or tea, it explains, is counterproductive because hot liquid is “relaxing to the solids of the body.” As best I can tell, that means that the heat makes teeth go soft, which leads to decay. And the author can prove it! Cows that ate hot still-slops lost their teeth within a couple years and could no longer eat hay.
There’s no reason, of course, that this means Joseph wasn’t influenced by Grahamism or humorosity or pure revelation. But it’s interesting to see an early 19th century discussion of hot drinks as bad by virtue of temperature itself. And that view seems to have had at least some purchase on church members.
A note before anybody comments: this post is not about whether the lived Word of Wisdom prohibits coffee and tea. It very clearly does. Rather, it’s about where the term “hot drinks” in D&C 89 comes from and what Joseph’s contemporaries were saying about hot drinks.