Even the non-alcoholic version contained “the valuable TONIC and NERVE STIMULANT properties of the Coca plant and Cola nuts,” as advertisements put it, but in the early decades of the twentieth century (long after Pemberton’s death in 1888, by which time he’d sold off his rights to the drink), the Coca-Cola Company phased that ingredient out. It would be called “a valuable Brain Tonic, and a cure for all nervous affections.” Its supposed mental benefits became the main selling point in 1886, when temperance laws in Atlanta prompted a re-engineering of the formula.
Yet it was to upper-class intellectuals, their minds disordered by the rapid development of nineteenth-century America, that Pemberton promoted his invention. At the time, cocaine was an ingredient in a wine-based beverage enjoyed by Parisians called Vin Mariani.Ĭoca-Cola carries many associations today, few of them having to do with the life of the mind. But then he got word of a new substance with the potential to cure his “morphinism”: cocaine. Injured in the Civil War, Pemberton developed a morphine addiction for which he fruitlessly sought treatment. In that era, writes ’s Kat Eschner, “people overwhelmed by industrialization and urbanization as well as the holdover of the Civil War and other social changes struggled to gain purchase, turning to patent medicines for cures that doctors couldn’t provide.” And it was in a patent medicine, one of the countless many dubiously ballyhooed in the nineteenth century, that Coca-Cola first appeared. This, fair to say, was not the intention of John Stith Pemberton, the Georgia pharmacist who in the 1880s came up with the drink that would become Coca-Cola. We all know that sweetened, carbonated soft drinks have effects on those who drink them. The most conspicuous, among especially avid consumers, include obesity and its associated health troubles.
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