Thanks to Bertolucci and his film The protective sky, at the beginning of the 90s the novels of Paul Bowles became fashionable; stories of men and women who face the rigor of other cultures to which they cannot fully adapt.
But things started much earlier, when The Police released their latest album, which featured a song that was a nod to Paul Bowles. The song was titled Tea in the Sahara and, at that time, Bowles was an old man with his eyes faded by the aquatic light of Tangier, the city that would see him die some time later, at almost ninety years old.
With all this, the green tea trend appeared in Western cities, occupying a preferred place alongside black coffee or coffee with milk. Served in a small glass with mint, green tea soon became a ritual with literary aromas ranging from Paul Bowles to Arabian Nights. The exotic component was not missing in the three glasses, one for life, another for love and the last for death. However, tea was not discovered by the Moroccans, but by the Chinese.
It is a beneficial plant, whose infusion has promoted health for millennia due to polyphenols, molecules that protect cells from oxidative damage. At first, tea was a drink of the Chinese aristocracy and we had to wait for the fall of the Mongol Empire for tea to break the borders and stop being a drink of the elite. But what interests us here is that tea was the provision that would not be missing on ships when China was the naval power of the world (1405-1433). The amount of vitamin C contained in the infusion prevented scurvy, a disease also known as sailors’ disease.
It is estimated that between the 15th and 18th centuries, around three million sailors died from scurvy, a disease that led to death after the oral tissue rotted, causing a sticky halitosis. Nobody knew what the cause of this disease was.
And it is here where the Scottish doctor James Lind (1716-1794) will make history, who will look for the remedy by giving different diets to sailors in order to contrast the effects. As he deduced, sauerkraut helped, which is why the famous Captain Cook forced his crew to eat sauerkraut; but the pickled cabbage did not completely heal.
The solution would come from the hand of a naturalist named Joseph Banks, who embarked on the Endeavor of Cook and on whose voyage through the Pacific he caught scurvy. Frightened by an illness that was taking its toll on his mouth, Banks tried different treatments, beer, sauerkraut and, finally, lemon juice, thus finding the solution, as he recounts in one of the entries in his logbook. “The effect was surprising, in less than a week my gums became stronger than ever.”
When he let Cook know, he included citrus fruits in his crew’s diet and, with it, no man on the Endeavor died of scurvy. If they had asked the Chinese, many deaths could have been avoided.
But our Eurocentrism does not allow us to name the Chinese as pioneers when it comes to eradicating scurvy. They discovered the cure based on green tea, a drink that, years later, Paul Bowles would make famous under the protective sky of Morocco.
The stone ax It is a section where Montero Glezwith a desire for prose, exerts its particular siege on scientific reality to demonstrate that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge.
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