Gustav III was a mad Swedish king who decided to prove for once and for all that coffee and tea were lethal poisons. Death row inmates were experimented on in order to prove his point…
Click here to visit Wikipedia’s article on Gustav III of Sweden’s coffee experiment
Recently I saw Sir Iain Chalmers of the Cochrane Collaboration speak on the history of the clinical trial – essentially the received wisdom is that the first clinical trial was Bradford Hill’s in 1948, but Sir Iain went through a plethora of previous examples – all very interesting but I don’t recall him referencing King Gustav’s pioneering work – which if I recall correctly predated Sir Iain’s examples.