In 1638 the wife of Luis Geronimo Fernandez de Cabrera Bobadilla y Mendoza, fourth Count of Chinchon, lay sick of an intermittent fever in the palace at Lima. Her famous cure induced Linnæus, long afterwards, to name the whole genus of quinine-yielding trees in her honour chinchona. The godmother of these priceless treasures of the vegetable kingdom has, therefore, some claim upon our attention.
This Countess of Chinchon was a daughter of the noble house of Osorio, whose founder was created Marquis of Astorga by Henry IV., King of Castille. The eighth marquis, who died at Astorga in 1613, had a daughter by his wife Dona Blanca Manrique y Aragon, named Ana,[8] born in 1576; and the ruins of the palace in the curious old town of Astorga, in which she passed her childhood, are still standing.[9] At the early age of sixteen she was married to Don Luis de Velasco, Marquis of Salinas, who was about to assume the important office of viceroy of Mexico. She probably accompanied her husband to Mexico, and afterwards to Lima, as he was viceroy of Peru from 1596 to 1604. In the latter year he resumed his former office in Mexico, and, on his return to Spain, he became President of the Council of the Indies from 1611 to 1617.[10] The lady Ana had thus been a great traveller, when, in the latter year, she found herself a widow. In 1621 she was married, in the city of Madrid, to her second husband the fourth Count of Chinchon, who was descended from a long line of proud and valiant Catalonian ancestors. One of his forefathers, Don Andres de Cabrera, who was created Marquis of Moya in 1480, married Beatriz de Bobadilla, so well known in history as the faithful attendant and confidential friend of Queen Isabella the Catholic. The Emperor Charles V., remembering the services and ancient dignity of the illustrious families of Cabrera and Bobadilla, created the second son of the Marquis of Moya, by Beatriz de Bobadilla, Count of his town of Chinchon, in the kingdom of Toledo, in 1517.[11] The third Count was one of the over-worked ministers of that most indefatigable of "red-tapists" Philip II.; and his son became the husband of the widow Ana, who accompanied him to Lima on his appointment as viceroy of Peru in 1629. Thus, for the second time, this lady entered the City of the Kings as Vice-Queen.
While the Countess Ana was suffering from fever in 1638, in her sixty-third year, the Corregidor of Loxa, Don Juan Lopez de Canizares, sent a parcel of powdered quinquina bark to her physician, Juan de Vega, who was also captain of the armoury, assuring him that it was a sovereign and never-failing remedy for "tertiana." It was administered to the Countess and effected a complete cure; and Mr. Howard is of opinion that the particular plant which had this honour, and which, therefore, yields the true and original Peruvian bark, is the Chahuarguera variety of the C. Condaminea.[12] This kind contains a large percentage of chinchonidine, an alkaloid, the great importance of which is only now just beginning to be recognised, so that it is to chinchonidine, and not to quinine, that the Countess's cure is due.[13]
The Count of Chinchon returned to Spain in 1640, and his Countess, bringing with her a quantity of the healing bark, was thus the first person to introduce this invaluable medicine into Europe.[14] Hence it was sometimes called Countess's bark, and Countess's powder. Her physician, Juan de Vega, sold it at Seville for one hundred reals the pound. In memory of this great service Linnæus named the genus which yields it Chinchona, and afterwards the lady Ana's name was still further immortalized in the great family of Chinchonaceæ, which, together with Chinchonæ, includes ipecacuanhas and coffees. By modern writers the first h has usually been dropped, and the word is now almost invariably, but most erroneously, spelt Cinchona.
After the cure of the Countess of Chinchon, the Jesuits were the great promoters of the introduction of bark into Europe. In 1639, as the last act of his viceroyalty, her husband did good service to the cause of geographical discovery, by causing the expedition under the Portuguese Texeira to proceed from Quito to the mouth of the Amazons, accompanied by the Jesuit Acuña, who wrote a most valuable account of the voyage.[15] From that time the missionaries of Acuña's fraternity continued to penetrate into the forests bordering on the upper waters of the Amazons, and to form settlements; and Humboldt mentions a tradition that these Jesuits accidentally discovered the bitterness of the bark, and tried an infusion of it in tertian ague. In 1670 the Jesuit missionaries sent parcels of the powdered bark to Rome, whence it was distributed to members of the fraternity throughout Europe by the Cardinal de Lugo, and used for the cure of agues with great success. Hence the name of "Jesuits' bark," and "Cardinal's bark;" and it was a ludicrous result of its patronage by the Jesuits that its use should have been for a long time opposed by Protestants and favoured by Roman Catholics. In 1679 Louis XIV. bought the secret of preparing quinquina from Sir Robert Talbor, an English doctor, for two thousand louis-d'ors, a large pension, and a title. From that time Peruvian bark seems to have been recognised as the most efficacious remedy for intermittent fevers. The second Lord Shaftesbury, who died in 1699, mentions in one of his letters—"Dr. Locke's and all our ingenious and able doctors' method of treating fevers with the Peruvian bark:" he declares his belief that it is "the most innocent and effectual of all medicines;" but he also alludes to "the bugbear the world makes of it, especially the tribe of inferior physicians."
There can be no doubt that a very strong prejudice was raised against it, which it took many years to conquer; and the controversies which arose on the subject between learned doctors were long and acrimonious. Dr. Colmenero, a professor of the University of Salamanca, wrote a work in which he declared that ninety sudden deaths had been caused by its use in Madrid alone.[16] Chiflet (Paris, 1653) and Plempius (Rome, 1656), two great enemies of novelty, prophesied the early death of quinquina, and its inevitable malediction by future ages; while the more enlightened Badius (Genoa, 1656) defended its use, and quoted more than twelve thousand cures by the aid of this remedy, performed by the best doctors of the hospitals in Italy. In 1692 Dr. Morton, one of the opponents of its use, was obliged to retract all he had said against quinquina; and it was then that it began to be generally admitted as a valuable medicine. It still, however, remained a subject of controversy, and as late as 1714 two Italian physicians, Ramazzini and Torti,[17] held opposite views on the subject. Ramazzini wrote against its use with much violence, while Torti maintained that, in proper doses, it would arrest remittent and intermittent fevers.[18]
Whilst the inestimable value of Peruvian bark was gradually forcing conviction on the most bigoted medical conservatives of Europe, and whilst the number and efficacy of cures effected by its means were bringing it into general use, and consequently increasing the demand, it was long before any knowledge was obtained of the tree from which it was taken. In 1726 La Fontaine, at the solicitation of the Duchess of Bouillon, who had been cured of a dangerous fever by taking Peruvian bark, composed a poem in two cantos to celebrate its virtues; but the exquisite beauty of the leaves, and the delicious fragrance of the flowers of the quinquina-tree, with allusions to which he might have adorned his poem, were still unknown in Europe.
The first description of the quinquina-tree is due to that memorable French expedition to South America, to which all branches of science owe so much. The members of this expedition, MM. De la Condamine, Godin, Bouguer, and the botanist Joseph de Jussieu, sailed from Rochelle on the 16th of May, 1735, to measure the arc of a degree near Quito, and thus determine the shape of the earth. After a residence at Quito, Jussieu set out for Loxa, to examine the quinquina-tree, in March, 1739, and in 1743 La Condamine visited Loxa, and stayed for some time at Malacotas, with a Spaniard whose chief source of income was the collection of bark. He obtained some young plants with the intention of taking them down the river Amazons to Cayenne, and thence transporting them to the Jardin des Plantes at Paris; but a wave washed over his little vessel near Para, at the mouth of the great river, and carried off the box in which he had preserved these plants for more than eight months. "Thus," he says, "I lost them after all the care I had taken during a voyage of more than twelve hundred leagues."[19] This was the first attempt to transport chinchona-plants from their native forests.
Condamine described the quinquina-tree of Loxa in the 'Mémoires de l'Académie;'[20] he was the first man of science who examined and described this important plant; and in 1742 Linnæus established the genus Chinchona, in honour of the Countess Ana of Chinchon. He, however, only knew of two species, that of Loxa, which was named C. officinalis, and the C. Caribæa, since degraded to the medicinally worthless genus of Exostemmas.
Joseph de Jussieu, whose name is associated with that of La Condamine in the first examination of the chinchona-trees of Loxa, continued his researches in South America after the departure of his associate. He penetrated on foot into the province of Canelos, the scene of Gonzalo Pizarro's wonderful achievements and terrible sufferings; he visited Lima with M. Godin; he travelled over Upper Peru as far as the forests of Santa Cruz de la Sierra; and he was the first botanist who examined and sent home specimens of the coca-plant, the beloved narcotic of the Peruvian Indian. After fifteen years of laborious work he was robbed of his large collection of plants by a servant at Buenos Ayres, who believed that the boxes contained money. This loss had a disastrous effect on poor Jussieu, who, in 1771, returned to France, deprived of reason, after an absence of thirty-four years. Dr. Weddell has named the shrubby variety of C. Calisaya in honour of this unfortunate botanist C. Josephiana.