[Chocolate in some french pharmaceutical or medicinal books from XVIIth, XVIIIth and XIXth centuries. Its beneficent and inconvenient, proved or imaginary, effects]

Faculté de pharmacie, Nancy.

Rapidly after its appearance in France, interesting properties were attributed to chocolate and it was used in medicine,often wrongly, to treat digestive, pulmonary, nervous, even infectious diseases, and also for its nutritive and aphrodisiacal capability... But it was already charged with insomnia or constipation. During the XIXth century, chocolate was used as food and as an excipient for dissimulation and transportation of drugs. Medicinal chocolates were essentially nutritive and analeptic, pectoral, stomachic, purgative or anthelmintic. All of them have disappeared today, but the pharmacological interest of chocolate remains with its antidepressive activity and the promising proposes of some of its components. However, chocolate is still considered to be responsible of constipation, headache or pimples...

PMID: 14606481 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]