Gaspar Bravo de Sobremonte, who studied medicine at the University of Valladolid, where he held several chairs including Surgery, Method and Medicine, also wrote about cinchona. Bravo was considered one of the best physicians of his day, and many of his works were published in Spain and France. In the second edition of his Disputatio Apologetica pro Dogmatica Medicine Praestantia, which was published in 1639, he describes how the Spaniards – ‘us’, he calls them – used Peruvian bark to treat intermittent fevers after observing Indians in Peru drinking the powdered bark in hot water when they were shivering with cold.
In the 1670s, two other Spanish doctors also wrote about the curative effects of cinchona. Pedro Miguel de Heredia (no relation of Gaspar Caldera de la Heredia) studied medicine at one of the greatest of the Spanish faculties, Alcalá de Henares. There he held the chair of Prima of medicine, retaining it several times after the compulsory contests that took place every four years. Miguel left Alcalá de Henares in 1643. More than forty years later, the second edition of his four-volume Operum Medicinalium recounted how the Jesuits in Peru had tested cinchona.
Similarly, Miguel Salado Garcés, who held the chair of Method at the University of Seville and was committed to discovering every new drug that came from America, wrote in 1655 in his Estaciones medicas that ‘the missionaries of the Society of Jesus [in the province of Quito] used the powders of Quarango following the second transit of Galen with great ingenuity, after observing that the Indians took them when shivering from cold after swimming in iced water or from the coldness of the snow, and stop trembling within a short time; [the Jesuits] used them to control the shivering in tertian and quartan fevers: and as they noticed that the repetition of the fever stops, they advised them as a great febrifuge (and they still continue to do so) to cure them …’
Caldera, Bravo, Miguel and Salado Garcés all put the Jesuits at the centre of the story of the early discovery of cinchona in Peru. But who was responsible for gaining it such wide renown in Europe?
In the spring of 1605 a small group of Jesuit priests disembarked at Callao, at the mouth of the Rio Rimac downstream from Lima. For nearly three hundred days they had been tossed about, never knowing a moment’s quiet as they rode the swells of the vast Atlantic Ocean on their journey towards the southern tip of South America. The final part of the voyage, hugging the continent’s west coast, was if anything worse than the open sea. Gigantic waves hurled themselves across the vessel, throwing up thick columns of spray that then collapsed upon the deck, drenching everything in a foamy swirl and threatening to drive the ship onto the jagged rocks.
Now that they had reached dry land, their leader Father Diego de Torres Bollo urged them ashore. As he called for yet more donkeys to carry the supplies that the priests had brought with them from the Holy City, one of their number, a small man in sandals and the rough brown tunic of a lay brother, broke away to look around him.
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,