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 known 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