Message #160604

[Bianca]

SEBASTIANO BAIO'S BOOK









The history of cinchona bark, which dates back more than 300 years, has greatly influenced that of pharmacy, botany, medicine, trade, theoretical and practical chemistry, and tropical agriculture.

Circa 1650, the physician Sebastiano Bado declared that this bark had proved more precious to mankind than
all the gold and silver that the Spaniards had obtained from South America, and the world confirmed his opinion.

In the 1700s, the Italian professor of medicine Ramazzini said that the introduction of Peruvian bark would be of the same importance to medicine that the discovery of gunpowder was to the art of war, an opinion endorsed by contemporary writers on the history of medicine.

Whoever has searched the annals of cinchona will recognize the truth of the following observations of Weddel (d. 1877): "Few subjects in natural history have excited general interest in a higher degree than cinchona; none perhaps have hitherto merited the attention of a greater number of distinguished men".

Dissension, however, was rife at the time, mainly due to its source of discovery, the Jesuits.

As the great Alexander von Humboldt said, "It almost goes without saying that among Protestant physicians hatred of the Jesuits and religious intolerance lie at the bottom of the long conflict over the good or harm effected by Peruvian Bark".