MALAEIA AND THE PROGRESS OF MEDICINE. 239 



largest single element in the miseries of mankind. Fortunately, 

 malarial fever has almost disappeared from Great Britain, and it has 

 hardly existed in some of our colonies, particularly the Australasian ; 

 it has decreased considerably in many parts of Northern Europe and 

 the United States. Again, there is a drug, cinchona-bark, with its 

 products, which has a great power over the course of the fever. 

 The cultivation of the cinchona-tree is now a great industry both in 

 the Eastern and Western Hemispheres, and whatever quinine or other 

 products of the bark can do for malarious sickness will be, at no 

 distant time, a benefit that may be shared by all but the very poor- 

 est and the races least accessible to civilization. Lastly, the symp- 

 toms, course, and complications of the intermittent and remittent fe- 

 vers which malaria causes are known with all the precision that can 

 be wished. What share, then, has medicine had in dealing with this 

 destroyer of human happiness in the past, and what is the attitude 

 of medicine toward malaria at present ? 



The almost total extinction of malaria at home and its decrease 

 abroad have been brought about in the ordinary course of draining 

 and cultivating the soil, and by a wise attention to the planting or 

 conservation of trees. There is a characteristic passage at the end 

 of Kingsley's novel " Hereward," in which he commemorates his hero 

 as the first of the new English "who, by the inspiration of God, 

 began to drain the fens." The draining of the fens and all such 

 achievements throughout the world have brought better health with 

 them, but neither the doctors nor even the sanitarians have been the 

 primary moving forces. Again, the medicinal uses of cinchona-bark 

 were known first to the indigenous inhabitants of the Peruvian Andes, 

 where the trees are native and where the ague is common ; and it was 

 the Jesuits who introduced it widely into Europe (1630) and the East. 

 The story of the reception of this remedy by the medical profession 

 has its unpleasant side. The arch-stupidities of the Paris faculty, 

 who still live for the amusement of the world in Moliere's comedies, 

 opposed it with their united weight. Court physicians in other Eu- 

 ropean capitals than Paris assailed it with abuse, and no one wrote 

 more nonsense about it than Gideon Harvey, the physician of Charles 

 II. The new remedy, apart from its merits, fell in with the views of 

 the Paracelsists, and disagreed with the views of the Galenists, and 

 was recommended or condemned accordingly. Even the great Stahl, 

 nearly a century after cinchona was first brought to Spain, would 

 have none of it, and, in his servitude to his theories, he even went so 

 far as to make use of Gideon Harvey's ignorant tirade against the 

 drug by reprinting it in German. As late as 1729, an excellent phy- 

 sician of Breslau, Kanold, whose writings on epidemics are still val- 

 uable for their comprehensive grasp, declared in his last illness (a 

 " pernicious quartan ") that he would sooner die than make use of a 

 remedy which went so direct against his principles ! The world, of 



