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 1624), 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.
The Inca world was ruled by spirits and superstition. Every village was surrounded by secret places – trees, rocks, springs and caves – that had a magical significance. The Incas collected unusual objects, and in every house there were canopas, or household deities, displayed in a niche in a corner or stowed in a special place, wrapped in cloths. They observed rituals throughout their daily lives, sprinkling chicha or coca when ploughing, saying prayers and incantations when crossing rivers, making sacrifices on particular occasions and always leaving an object on the pile of stones that is still often to be found at the top of every pass.
The Incas lived in fear of the sorcerers, the old men who foretold the future by studying the shape of ears of corn, the entrails of animals or the movement of the clouds, and were terrified of the magic spells they cast to cause love or grief in their victims. But they also revered them, for many of the sorcerers were medicine men as well as magicians. In some parts of Peru they would undertake trepanning, cutting open the skull to let out evil spirits and to offer the patient some relief from pain or swelling. The rich Quechua language shows that the Incas had a fine knowledge of anatomy and medicine, with words such as hicsa for abdomen, cunca oncoy for angina, susuncay for putting to sleep, siqui tullu for coccyx, husputay for haemorrhage, hanqqu for nerve and rupphapacuy for fever.
They amassed a great store of knowledge about local plants and how to use them to treat different ailments, and were particularly expert on poisons and plants with hallucinogenic qualities – every man would carry upon him a little packet of coca leaves for chewing on. They also used the trumpet-shaped Solanaceae, or datura as it is better known, in magic spells to cast their enemies into a trance, sarsaparilla as a diuretic, tembladera (Equisetum bogotense) against pyorrhoea, a plant they called llaquellaque (Rumex cuneifolius) as a purgative of the blood, ortiga (Urtica magellanica) to cure sciatica, and payco (Chenopodium ambrosoides) against worms.
The two volumes of El Libro de Viáticos y Almacén show just how elaborately Brother Salumbrino and his fellow Jesuit priests would prepare for a trip out of the city. Every traveller would be issued with a mule for riding on, and another for carrying their supplies. Many of the mules’ names survive in the records: La Cabezuda, La Caminante, La Mulata, El Galán. The supplies would include hay for the mules, for the desert of northern Peru in particular was short of fodder, and often of water too. The traveller would also be equipped with a bowl, a spoon for the table and a knife for cutting meat, a bedroll and a sheet, a roll of sealing wax, spices in the form of saffron, pepper and cinnamon, wine, a sombrero, a soutane and a cape to keep out the cold in the mountains. The grandest inventories included travelling altars, supplies of wine and wheat hosts for offering communion, and even silver candlesticks. But, grand or simple, each traveller’s list concludes with patacones, fried plantain chips, for an Indian guide, and more patacones for el gasto del camino, the road toll.
Despite the rips in the pages of these ancient books, they still summon, nearly three centuries on, a pervasive and enormously fierce sense of just how energetic and enterprising the Jesuits were. On 26 April 1628, the earliest entry in the book that mentions Brother Salumbrino, the pharmacist sent the Jesuit college at Arequipa, at least three weeks’ ride south of Lima, not far from Lake Titicaca, four cases of drugs, including eight libras of caña fistula. The following month he sent the college another eight libras of caña fistula and a copy of the Meditations of St Ignatius Loyola. In August of that same year he despatched supplies of tobacco and cocoa and another three boxes of caña fistula, and the following April the mule load to Arequipa would include four bottles with different drugs ‘sent by Brother Agustín’.
San Pablo was making a name for itself as a trading post, and it was not confined to medicines. It imported textiles from England, Spain, France and the Low Countries, Italy and the Philippines, and large quantities of black taffeta from China. It provided Jesuit schools in the region with ink and paper imported from Italy—in 1629 San Pablo despatched three thousand pens in a single huge shipment that went to the Jesuit College in Santiago, Chile. Farm tools such as ploughs, sickles and hoes were in