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THE ESSEX NATURALIST.
malaria in Italy, Belgium and England were indebted to
mem0ers of the Society of Jesus for their practical acquaintance
with this useful remedy. It was the misfortune, not the fault,
of the Jesuit fathers that the popular name the drug received
in Belgium impeded its progress: as Mr. Bernard Howard
reminded us the other day, "for a time it caused the entire
Protestant community of Europe, in their infinite wisdom, to
ignore the properties and taboo the use of Jesuits' Bark." The
somewhat quizzical comment of Voltaire, who was not a bigoted
Catholic, regarding the refusal of the anything but narrow-minded
Duchess of Marlborough to take Jesuits' Bark when she suffered
from malaria, suggests that the feeling to which Mr. Howard
alludes was fairly pronounced in England. But the historian
knows that Protestant dislike of the popular name may have
been fortified by knowledge of Catholic doubt as to the merits
of the drug. Chifflet's discourse on the subject, though fair and
judicious, was followed by an acrimonious controversy, which
lasted for a decade, between those who favoured and those who
disliked the new remedy. The dispute was racial not sectarian:
Italian and Belgian physicians advocated Cinchona; French
and Spanish physicians, including the Royal physicians at both
Courts, condemned its use. When at last Spanish opposition
to its use subsided, an acrid quarrel broke out in 1663 between
the Spanish and Italian physicians who favoured its use as to
whether the credit of introducing Cinchona Bark to European
medicine belonged to the Jesuit Fathers at Rome or to the Count
of Chincon: the historian notes that the Countess is not
mentioned, and realises from this that the current version of
the story was not concocted till after 1663. He sees, from
the fact that distribution of the bark at Rome is said to have
begun in 1639, that this claim was not of Jesuit origin: Jesuits
could have said with truth that they had known the bark since
1632; they may, for all we know, have tried it at Rome in 1632,
as the physicians at Alcala actually did in 1639. But the bark
was not regularly imported on a commercial scale in 1639. When
its regular import set in, and the Royal physicians in Spain
opposed its use, a newly promoted Spanish cardinal at Rome,
approved of the remedy. The historian is satisfied that the
opposition of the Royal physicians in France was not overcome
as a result of Italian or Belgian or Spanish argument; the