HISTORY IN BOTANICAL STUDY.
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the virtues of Cinchona by a sufferer from malaria who was
cured by drinking the water of a pool into which a Cinchona
tree had fallen. This tale, however, bears more resemblance to
a modern newspaper paragraph than to an early native tradition:
suspicion is aroused by the fact that the tale occurs in two forms,
one of which makes the fortunate patient an Indian cacique,
the other makes him a Spanish soldier. The latter circumstance
suggests that the story may be later in origin than the invasion
of Peru in 1513. Whatever the date of the tale, it at least
reflects early difference of opinion as to whether the natives of
Peru knew the virtues of Cinchona Bark.
If the cure of the Corregidor of Loja in 1630 explains the
choice of 1930 as the proper date for the Cinchona Tercentenary,
and may explain the introduction of the drug to the notice
of his Order in Europe by Barnabe de Cobo in 1632, it is generally
admitted that little came of the attempt then made: a more
sensational cure was needed to stir the imagination of the
Faculty of Medicine. The necessary case came in 1638,
when the physician to the Viceroy of Peru, Dr. Juan de Vega,
is officially reported to have cured, by means of Cinchona
Bark, no less illustrious a malaria-stricken patient than the
Vicereine. The Viceroy then was the fourth Count of
Chincon, whose entry into Lima in state, accompanied by his
Countess, took place in 1629. The official records of his tenure
of office show that during the period 1629-38 both he and the
Countess suffered frequently from malaria, but 1638 appears
to have been the first occasion on which either came to know of
Cinchona, and it is not unreasonable to conjecture that the first
definitely recorded trial of that bark in the treatment of malaria
in Europe, which took place at Alcala de Henares, near Madrid,
in 1639, may have been made on the recommendation of the
grateful Viceroy and rendered possible owing to the supply by
him of the drug actually used.
This, the historian need hardly remind you, is not how the
story is taught to students of botany and pharmacy in Britain.
What we were taught was that in 1638 the Countess Ana d'Osorio,
wife of the Count of Chincon, then Viceroy of Peru, contracted
malaria, and that Canizares, the Corregidor of Loja, having
heard of the lady's illness, promptly supplied her physician,
Dr. Juan de Vega, with some of the bark that had cured him