Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/452

 General Therapeutics.—Transfusion.—The Discovery of Cinchona and Ipecacuanha.—In the department of general therapeutics, as we learn from Berendes, several important new measures were brought forward during the seventeenth century; and among these the following deserve to receive brief mention in this place: the operation of transfusing blood from a healthy individual to one who is ill; the introduction of cinchona into the European pharmacopoeia as an efficient remedy in the treatment of certain fevers; the similar introduction of another South American drug—viz., ipecacuanha; and the invention of many medico-*chemical products and the improvement of others that were already in common use.

As regards the operation of transfusion, from which great things were expected, Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723), the famous architect and astronomer of London, is reported to have been the first person to urge a trial of this procedure. On the other hand, Robert Boyle, the chemist, actually performed the operation on animals. He followed the method suggested by Richard Lower (1631-1691) of England, viz., by allowing the blood to flow from the carotid artery of one animal into the jugular vein of a second animal; while Edmund King adopted the plan of allowing the blood to pass from the jugular vein of one animal into the corresponding vein of a second animal. Upon a human being the operation was probably performed for the first time (in 1666) by Denys, Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics in Paris. Repetitions of the operation were made, two or three years later, in London and in Rome, but they produced no good effects and in some instances they terminated in the death of the individual for whose benefit the operation had been performed. In 1668 the French Parliament and the Papal Government forbade a repetition of the operation.

In 1638—so the story runs—the wife of Count Cinchon, Viceroy of Peru, was cured of a stubborn intermittent fever by the native physicians, who employed, in their treatment of the malady, the bark of the tree now universally known by the name of "Cinchona." In 1640 Juan del Vego, the