Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/176

164 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 entertained 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 socalled Peruvian bark in the treatment of ague; and in 1638 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 approach 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 quasi-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 anæsthetics in obstetrical cases, was immediately 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