52 Kansas Academy of Science. 



shops developed, through the zest for discovering new medicines, the 

 chemist and the science of chemistry. 



Later came the separation of all three during the eighteenth and 

 nineteenth centuries, and gradually the chemist became the scientific 

 student looking for scientific laws governing the composition of matter 

 and the changes it undergoes; the medical men became the curers of 

 disease and the student of the human body in health and disease, while 

 the pharmacist became the student of the plants of the field and forest, 

 the chemicals of the chemist, and their proper preparation in forms 

 suitable for administration as medicines. Each had his field, and each 

 field was important and required great patience, ingenuity and careful 

 study and observation. Each science developed gradually and steadily 

 along different lines, medicine and pharmacy confining their activities 

 to curing disease, while chemistry not only did its share to produce 

 new medical substances, but spread out gradually over all the other 

 branches of industry that have to do with matter of any and every kind, 

 until to-day any industry that does not employ the latest discoveries and 

 methods of chemistry in its processes, from the laundry to the steel 

 plant, cannot successfully compete with its present-day competition. 



Such were the remote beginnings of pharmaceutical and medical chem- 

 istry. We may imagine one of our remote ancestors brought face to 

 face with disease. How mysterious must have seemed to him the phe- 

 nomenon that to-day he is strong, active and full of life and to-morrow 

 he is weak, listless and about to die. How earnestly he must have 

 sought for means to remedy it. Spiritual and material means appealed 

 to his untutored mind. The modern savage shows the relics of this dual 

 method of combating disease. On the material side he found, in his 

 search for remedies, activity in bitterness and bitter substances, which 

 he came to regard by experimental method as beneficial. Harry Frank, 

 in his recent fascinating work, "Vagabonding Down the Andes," gives 

 the following interesting story which is apropos. He is describing Loja, 

 which was once the center of commerce in South America in cascarilla 

 (cinchona) : 



Loja was once the center of the commerce in cascarilla. The bark 

 of a tree not unlike the cherry in appearance abounds in the ravines 

 of the mountains to the eastward of the city. Nearly three centuries ago 

 a missionary through the region found the Indians grinding the bitter 

 bark in their stone mortars and swallowing it as a specific against inter- 

 mittent fevers, as they do to this day. When the wife of Conde de 

 Chinchon, viceroy of Peru, lay ill of the fever in Lima the corregidor of 

 Loja sent to her physician a parcel of the powdered bark. Upon her 

 return to Europe the Condesa carried a quantity of the magic powder 

 with her, whence it was for a long time known as cinchona. Mean- 

 time, Jesuit missionaries of Brazil had sent parcels of it to Rome, 

 whence it was distributed among the brotherhood, nothing loath to add 

 to their reputation for miraculous powers and to the income of their 

 drug store, and the name of "Jesuit bark" became widespread. The 

 tree, however, has always been known to the Indians by the name 

 Quina-Quina, and in time the refined product, quinine, took on its modem 

 name. 



