The Miraculous Fever-Tree Read online

  Agustino Salumbrino was then about twenty-five years old, but his beard was thick and he looked older, for he had started work when he was still very young, and had never taken a single day of rest since. While Salumbrino had already studied and travelled more than most men would have done in a lifetime, he knew that Peru was the place where he would spend the rest of his days. More than that, he knew exactly what he would do with his time there.

  Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of Peru in the 1530s was well known to Europeans by the beginning of the seventeenth century, for at least two of the conquistadors who had travelled with him to South America had written widely-read accounts of the magnificent Inca civilisation. Pizarro’s conquest was driven entirely by greed for Inca gold and treasure, but he painted it with a religious sheen to give legitimacy to his actions. Accompanying him on his first journey to the New World was a troop of Dominican priests. Four decades later, on 1 April 1568, the first Jesuit priests, eight of them in all, arrived in Lima.

  The city was then only thirty-three years old, and still known by the name Pizarro had given it, La Ciudad de los Reyes. Despite its strange microclimate, which casts a thick fog over the coast for nearly ten months of the year, the City of Kings deeply impressed the small party of Jesuits. They admired the formal chequer pattern of the streets, so characteristic of sixteenth-century Spanish towns, that extended in a straight line right down to the Rio Rimac, which now runs through the centre of the city. They thought highly of the beautiful public square in front of the viceregal palace, the monasteries of the religious communities and the buildings of the civil and ecclesiastical administrators. Father Diego de Bracamonte, one of the newly arrived Jesuits, paid Lima a handsome compliment when he wrote home describing the city as ‘another Seville’.

  Among the first tasks to which the young Jesuits set their minds was finding a suitable location for housing the fledgling mission. Before paying a call on the acting Governor, Lope Garcia de Castro, they explored the city. They soon chose a square, three blocks to the east of what is now the Plaza Mayor, which then housed the Viceroy’s palace, and three blocks from the Franciscans, in a rather densely populated area of the city. After a brief public hearing, the Jesuits were granted the expropriated property, for which they were obliged to pay twelve thousand pesos in compensation to its former owners. The transaction, which was completed in just over two weeks, makes it sound as if the Jesuits had arrived in Lima with plenty of money. If anything, the reverse was true: for thirteen years after they moved in to San Pablo the Jesuits had to assign one of their most capable lay brothers to be the limosnero, the man in charge of begging alms on a daily basis from the well-to-do families of the city.

  In the early years, the Jesuit College of San Pablo depended for its existence on these donations from the citizens of Lima, and a series of small and sporadic royal grants. In 1581, though, San Pablo took over a property outside the city, and over nearly two centuries, until the Jesuits’ expulsion from the Spanish Empire in 1767, those holdings steadily increased in size until the Society of Jesus became one of the country’s biggest landholders. Its haciendas produced wheat, which was ground into flour in a mill that was also owned by the college. The Society planted new vines and an olive grove, which provided the Jesuit fathers with as much wine and oil as they needed. They raised cattle and goats, and grew sugar cane. A trapiche, or sugar mill, produced sugar and cane syrup. By 1600 San Pablo owned about ten rural properties, of which some were put under intense cultivation while others were used for grazing.

  The haciendas fed and clothed all the 160 or so priests who lived at the college in Lima. By the first half of the seventeenth century they also supported two thousand workers whom the Jesuits employed to run their properties, and three hundred slaves who were engaged in the vineyards of San Xavier, picking and pressing the grapes and producing the well-known Jesuit wines, as well as pisco, the traditional Peruvian liquor that is distilled from white grapes. As the haciendas grew bigger and more efficient, they turned from being simple agricultural properties into agro-industrial plants—a fusion of farms with mills, sugar refineries and distilleries – which delivered to Peruvian markets some of the best wines, flowers, sugar, oil and honey available in the viceroyalty.

  Over the years many Jesuits sailed across the Atlantic to join the missions that were being set up in Chile and Argentina, as well as Peru, but there was always room for more. In order to expand throughout the viceroyalty, the Jesuit mission in Lima had to have more resources. And that meant more people.

  Thus it was that in 1601 Diego de Torres Bollo, one of the senior Jesuit priests at the mission of San Pablo in Lima, left for Rome to petition the Vicar-General of the Order of the Society of Jesus to send more young Jesuits to South America. To reach the Holy City he had had to sail around the north-west coast of South America to Panama, then travel by mule over the isthmus to Puertobelo before resuming his journey once again by ship. The voyage took many months, and was fraught with danger. Not long after he arrived, Torres Bollo fell ill and was admitted to the Jesuit infirmary in Rome. The man who took care of him was Agustino Salumbrino.

  Salumbrino had joined the Jesuits in 1588. After taking his vows in Rome in 1590, he was sent to the Jesuit college in Milan to become an infirmarian. There he made a special study of pharmacy, and when, after a few years, he returned to Rome, he resolved to put his medical knowledge at the service of the many Jesuits who lived in the Holy City. In the course of his convalescence, Torres Bollo, who would later found the Jesuit mission in Paraguay, told Salumbrino all about St Ignatius’ missions in the New World, and the great college of San Pablo which was being built in the young city of Lima. He described the plans the Peruvian Jesuits had for setting up new missions over the whole continent.

  Each time he came to see his patient, Salumbrino, like the Mill Hill fathers whom I had visited in north London, felt the call of the mysterious world across the seas. As he listened to Torres Bollo, the lay brother began to recognise what his life’s work would be. He would go to Peru and live in the college of San Pablo in Lima, putting his knowledge of pharmacy to good use as he built up the botíca into the best pharmacy in the New World, which for nearly forty years, until his death in 1642, is exactly what he did.

  Today, the soaring Baroque church of San Pedro, next to the Biblioteca Nacional in the centre of Lima, is all that is left of the great Jesuit College of San Pablo, which rapidly fell into disrepair after the Jesuits were expelled from the Viceroyalty of Peru and the rest of the Spanish Empire in 1767.

  The church is dark, though well cared for. The remnants of its first crucifix are housed in a glass cabinet in a corner. The dark wood gleams in the shadows. In another corner, a vast reliquary rises. When you look at it more closely, you see that it is made of hundreds of boxes of dusty human bones, said to come from the many local priests who have been canonised and then forgotten.

  The priest who says mass there today, under the fifty-two crystal chandeliers strung along the ceiling, urges his congregation, as Catholic priests do everywhere, to ‘go in peace, and to love and serve the Lord’. Despite the medieval, talismanic quality of the church’s interior, its enormous congregations reflect the power that the Catholic Church still commands in Peru, and the extent to which it has permeated every level of political and intellectual life. Alejandro Toledo, who won the presidential election in 2001, considered including two Jesuits in his cabinet. One was a well-known figure, Father Juan Julio Witch, an economist and academic who became a household name in 1997 after the Japanese embassy in Lima was taken over by terrorists during a reception to celebrate the Emperor’s birthday. Given the opportunity to leave the embassy compound, Father Juan elected instead to stay behind with the other hostages. For four months he said mass there every day, urging his small and frightened congregation to keep their spirits up and pray for salvation, while outside television cameras and frustrated army marksmen waited for the terrorists to give way. Today his name is kno
wn throughout Peru.

  It has long been accepted that the Jesuits were responsible for introducing cinchona into Europe. As I read more about the role of the Society of Jesus in Peru’s long history, I kept wondering if, after all the wars and insurrections, burning and looting, any written material still survived from their earliest time there. Eventually, I learned that the bulk of a large private collection of Peruvian Jesuitica, built up by an obsessive hoarder, Father Rubén Vargas Ugarte, who came from a wealthy family and was himself a Jesuit priest, a historian of the Church and a Peruvian nationalist, had been placed in the state archives in Lima. No one could tell me over the telephone what the collection contained. And so I travelled to Peru, not knowing what I might find, or indeed whether I would find anything at all.

  For a long time after I got there, I was little the wiser.

  The state archive occupies a dark corner at the back of the building that is better known as the Peruvian national bank. It has its own entrance, but there is no sign on the door; nor, once you are inside, are there any directions to tell you where to go. At least Father Rubén’s material was there, though what it contained no one could tell me. It hadn’t been opened, and although some of its papers had been looked over by scholars past, the collection had come with no inventory and there was no catalogue. But I was welcome, the librarian said, to look through it if I wanted. A long pile of boxes was stacked down the hallway, though quite how far it extended and how many boxes it contained I couldn’t really tell.

  The librarian gave me a key to the archive, and said I could work there for as long as I wanted each day. Outside, Peruvians were preparing to go to the polls. The atmosphere was tense, and there was a sporadic curfew. Occasionally I would emerge from the archive at the end of the day and find that I could not return to my hotel. I went back inside and slept on the floor, shielded from the draught by Father Rubén’s mountains of paper.

  I began methodically going through each box. I picked out details of property transactions, plantings and harvests on the Society’s haciendas, chronicles of boundary disputes, baptismal records, the sale and purchase of slaves, shopping lists, inventories. I had come across Agustino Salumbrino’s name in the Jesuit archive in Rome, but I still knew very little about him. Would I ever find out more?

  Then one day I found two old books dating back to 1624. They were inventories. Page after page in the volumes of El Libro de Viáticos y Almacén are filled with inky lines that once were black but now are faded to a rusty brown. The quills the writers used were so sharp they have ripped through the paper. That these documents survived at all was a miracle. No one has ever tried to conserve them, and some of the paper crumbled in my hand. Yet it was still possible to read what the Jesuit administrator of San Pablo had written there nearly four hundred years earlier. In addition to listing everything that came into and went out of the college, from the cases of books that were sent from Europe to supplies of medicines, clothing and tableware that were despatched to other Jesuit missions, he also provided a complete inventory of Brother Salumbrino’s pharmacy.

  By the time Agustino Salumbrino arrived in Lima in 1605, the mission at San Pablo was firmly established, with several classrooms, a small library, a chapel, private rooms and even an infirmary, which, although basic, was clean and well run. Salumbrino quickly realised, however, that the infirmary was not sufficient to take proper care of all the sick in Lima. What he needed was a proper pharmacy, and a steady supply of medicines. These were hard to obtain in colonial Peru, but Salumbrino was a tireless worker, and he had made up his mind not merely to build a pharmacy, a botíca, as it was called, at San Pablo, but to do it in the grand manner, not only to serve the college’s local needs, but to supply all the Jesuit colleges throughout the viceroyalty.

  Agustino Salumbrino’s ambition to set up a pharmacy to help treat the poor of Lima had its roots not just in the rich medical lore that he encountered as soon as he arrived in Lima, but also in the Jesuits’ earliest philosophy. The instructions left by the founder of the order, St Ignatius Loyola, forbade his followers to become doctors. The task that lay before them, he emphasised, should focus upon men’s souls. This did not mean that Jesuits were ignorant of the importance of maintaining good health; indeed, every Jesuit mission was enjoined to appoint one of their number as a ‘prefect of health’ to ensure that the priests’ diet was adequate and that they were well cared for. The most capable lay brothers would be chosen to run the college’s infirmary and have immediate care of the sick. Most important, the Society’s founder insisted, each college would ensure that it had an adequate supply of medicines, either by setting up a pharmacy of its own, or by finding a reliable source of supply. Despite being expressly forbidden to practise medicine, Jesuit priests often turned their attention to the study of herbs and plants, and a number of them, especially in the foreign missions, became apothecaries.

  San Pablo’s infirmary was in a clean and quiet courtyard in the south-eastern corner of the college. By the time it was properly established it had about fifteen private rooms, all facing the fountain in the centre of the courtyard. Brother Salumbrino built his pharmacy close by the infirmary. Knowing that he needed to be as self-sufficient as possible, he began by planting a small herbarium in a corner of the garden at San Pablo. He chose plants that were well known for their medicinal properties: camphor, rue, nicotiana, saffron and caña fistula, a Peruvian wild cane that was often used for stomach disorders in place of rhubarb. These Brother Salumbrino and his two assistants made up into medicinal compounds, which were dried, powdered and mixed in the laboratory according to strict pharmaceutical rules. To help him, Salumbrino ordered two of the most important pharmacopoeias then available in Europe: Luis de Olviedo’s Methodo de la Colección y Reposición de las Medicinas Simples y de su Corrección y Preparación (printed in Madrid in 1581), which he had used in Rome; eventually, he also ordered Juan del Castillo’s Pharmacopoea Universa Medicamenta in Officinis Pharmaceuticis Usitata Complectens et Explicans (printed in Cadiz in 1622).

  Pharmacopoeias were works that described chemicals, drugs and medicinal preparations. They were issued regularly with the approval of different medical authorities, and were considered standard manuals in every pharmacy in Europe. Besides these two classics, Brother Salumbrino could also consult and follow the prescriptions of Girolamo Mercuriale, physician to the Medicis and Professor at the universities of Padua, Bologna and Pisa, who exercised a profound influence on medical circles all over Europe.

  Over the next century and a half the botíca at San Pablo would order at least ten other pharmacopoeias that specialised in local drugs and chemicals, including its vade mecum, Felix Palacios’ Palestra Farmaceutica, which was printed in Madrid in 1713, the year after Francesco Torti had his ‘Tree of Fevers’ published. The botíca put in regular orders for extra copies of Palacios’ work to be sent out to the other Jesuit colleges in the viceroyalty. The book was so highly regarded, and was so frequently referred to, that the pharmacists at San Pablo would eventually write inside the cover of their own copy: para el uso diario de esta botíca (‘for the daily use of this pharmacy’).

  By 1767, when the Jesuits were forced to leave Peru and the final inventory of the pharmacy was compiled, the San Pablo medical library contained about a hundred books. The full list, given in another set of books that I found among Father Rubén’s boxes, Cuenta de la Botíca 1757–1767, included the ancient classics by Galen and Hippocrates as well as voluminous Latin commentaries on the two masters by several medieval doctors. The library also had books on several other branches of medicine, including anatomy and osteology, treatises on different kinds of fevers and their remedies, descriptions of contagious diseases and their infections, and the methods of combating them.

  Surgery was also a favourite subject at San Pablo, and one could find on the shelves of the college’s library Bartolomé Hidalgo de Agüero’s Thesoro de la Verdadera Cirugía y Via Particular contra la Común (printed in Seville in 16
24), and Juan Calvo’s Primera y Segunda Parte de la Cirugía Universal y Particular del Cuerpo Humano, which was published in Madrid in 1626 and reprinted many times in the seventeenth century, and was still in use more than a hundred years later – though one shudders to think of operations being carried out without the benefit of any anaesthetic or antibiotics in the humid atmosphere of seventeenth-century South America.

  The Jesuits who came to Peru just after Pizarro’s conquest of the Incas were the first order with a clear mission to educate and then, by doing so, to convert the Indians to Catholicism.

  There was a clear division, though, over exactly how this should be done. The ascetic, intellectual Jesuits who ran the order from Rome were of one view, while the energetic activists who left their homes to promote its interests overseas were of quite another. The young Jesuits in Lima were pioneers of the soul. They believed strongly in catechism. Each day, a group of priests would leave San Pablo, walking in procession through the streets of Lima, holding a crucifix and ringing a bell to attract groups of Indians and blacks to whom they would preach. Not everyone liked this. One early Provincial Superior of the Jesuits in Peru, José de Acosta, was dismayed by this helter-skelter missionary activity, and was bitterly critical of having so many men tramp around as ‘holy vagabonds’. His own bias tended towards the old Jesuit ideal of learned men influencing councils and kings.

  What he failed to realise was that most of the Jesuits, such as Brother Agustino Salumbrino, who went to Peru early on were not driven to write books or meditate. They were zealous, educated men, full of drive and courage, who wanted to make a difference, whether it was by saving souls or promoting good health.

  The early Jesuits soon expanded their missionary activity to Cuzco, the old Inca capital that Pizarro seized in 1534. They bought a fine palace that had been taken over by one of Pizarro’s lieutenants on the main square, only to tear it down and build the towering pink Baroque church that still stands today. From there the Society sent its priests out into the countryside to make contact with the local Indian communities and urge them to renounce the animist gods they had worshipped for centuries in favour of a Christian Almighty.