164 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



it highly, and two Jesuits, Acosta and Don Antonio Julian, were 

 converted to this view ; but the conservative spirit in the Church 

 was too strong; in 1567 the Second Council of Lima, consisting of 

 bishops from all parts of South America, condemned it, and two 

 years later came a royal decree declaring that " the notions enter- 

 tained by the natives regarding it are an illusion of the devil." 



As a pendant to this singular mistake on the part of the older 

 Church came another committed by many leading Protestants. In 

 the early years of the seventeenth century the Jesuit missionaries 

 in South America learned from the natives the value of the so- 

 called Peruvian bark in the treatment of ague ; and in 1G38 the 

 Countess of Cinchona, Regent of Peru, having derived great 

 benefit from the new remedy, it was introduced into Europe. 

 Although with its alkaloid, quinine, it is perhaps the nearest ap- 

 proach to a medical specific, and has diminished the death-rate in 

 certain regions to an amazing extent, its introduction was bitterly 

 opposed by many conservative members of the medical profession, 

 and in this opposition large numbers of ultra-Protestants joined, 

 out of hostility to the Roman Church. In the heat of sectarian 

 feeling the new remedy was stigmatized as " an invention of the 

 devil " ; and so strong was this opposition that the new medicine 

 was not introduced into England until 1653, and even then its use 

 was long held back, owing mainly to anti-Catholic feeling. 



What the theological method on the ultra-Protestant side 

 could do to help the world at this very time is seen in the fact 

 that, while this struggle was going on, Hoffman was attempting 

 to give a scientific theory of the action of the devil in causing 

 Job's boils. This effort at a gimsi-scientific explanation which 

 should satisfy the theological spirit, comical as it at first seems, 

 is really worthy of serious notice, because it must be considered 

 as the beginning of that inevitable effort at compromise which 

 we see in the history of every science when it begins to appear 

 triumphant.* 



But I pass to a typical conflict in our days, and in a Protestant 

 country. In 1847 James Young Simpson, a Scotch physician, who 

 afterward rose to the highest eminence in his profession, having 

 advocated the use of anaesthetics in obstetrical cases, was imme- 

 diately met by a storm of opposition. This hostility flowed from 

 an ancient and time-honored belief in Scotland. As far back as 

 the year 1591, Eufame Macalyane, a lady of rank, being charged 



* For the opposition of the South American Church authorities to the introduction of 

 cocn,, etc., sec Marthsdale, Coca, Cocaine, and its Salts, London, 1886, p. 7. As to theo- 

 logical and sectarian resistance to quinine, see Russell, pp. 194, 253. Also Eccles ; also 

 Meryon, History of Medicine, London, 1861, vol. i, p. 74, note. For the great decrease in 

 deaths bv fever after the use of Peruvian bark began, sec statistical tables given in Rus- 

 sell, p. 252 ; and for Hoffman's attempt at compromise, ibid., p. 294. 



