El arcano de la quina (José Celestino Mutis, printed Madrid 1828)
The medical doctrine of cinchona written by José Celestino Mutis at Santa Fé de Bogotá, serialised in the city's newspaper from May 1793, and printed as a book at Madrid only in 1828, twenty years after his death. It sorts the bark into four official species with distinct uses, attacks the European habit of swallowing the crude bark, and arrives wrapped in an editor's prologue that dates the whole story and in notes that answer it with the new chemistry of quinine.
Why this wins its question: Mutis is usually met as the director of a botanical expedition and the patron of a famous set of plates, with the Arcano mentioned as a title. Read from the pages, it is something more useful: a working therapeutic text with a dosing schedule, an argument about why swallowing raw bark was harming people, and a four-species taxonomy that a rival Spanish expedition attacked in print. This object quotes that doctrine, dates its serialisation in a colonial newspaper to the issue and the day, separates Mutis's own voice from the 1828 editor who prints quinine chemistry against him in the footnotes, keeps the forest destruction and the royal monopoly figures the same editor recorded, and names the Peruvian counter-case instead of leaving the reader with a single hemisphere's version.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The book read here is "El arcano de la quina. Discurso que contiene la parte médica de las cuatro especies de Quinas oficinales, sus virtudes eminentes y su legítima preparacion", declared on its title page an "OBRA PÓSTUMA" of José Celestino Mutis, "Director y Gefe de la espedicion botánica de Santa Fé de Bogotá en el nuevo reyno de Granada", published with notes, an appendix and a historical prologue by the court apothecary Manuel Hernández de Gregorio, and printed at Madrid by Ibarra, printer to the King's chamber, in 1828.
Its organising claim is that the bark is not one drug but four. Section VIII states that "La Divina Providencia nos ha franqueado las cuatro Quinas oficinales naranjada, roja, amarilla y blanca; especies realmente distintas segun las reglas botánicas, y de virtudes eminentes en su línea, deducidas de la analogía y la esperiencia" — really distinct species, each with its own field of use, the distinction resting on analogy and experience rather than on any test the text can exhibit.
The therapeutic core is a timetable, not a slogan. For cutting short the next paroxysm of an intermittent fever the naranjada is to be chosen, "entre todas las especies la única directamente febrífuga", its tisane given first two hours before the expected attack, again at the onset of the chill, and then every two hours through the fever to a total of six doses — the doses to be completed even if the chill fails to appear after the first, and the attempt repeated up to three times before the fever is judged rebellious and handed to another method.
What the book is against is as specific as what it is for: the practice, inherited from Sydenham's followers and hardened by Van Swieten, of ordering the bark "en toda su substancia", which Mutis calls making the sick swallow portions of raw bark. He grades the species by what that habit did to patients — the yellow "benignísima", the naranjada "calorosa", the red "incendiaria" — and credits the maceration method of "nuestro doctor Alsinet" as an imperfect improvement on it.
Mutis's own account of the bark's history gives the first use to people who were not Spanish and the first supply to a single valley: in the years just after the discovery only one species circulated in Europe, "la Quina naranjada ó primitiva, rescatada en Loxa", taken from the tree by harvesters who stripped it only as high as a man's hand could reach and kept only the thick "Cortezones".
The text reached print by an unusually broken route, as its 1828 editor sets it out: it ran in the newspaper of Santa Fé de Bogotá from number 89 of Friday 10 May 1793 to number 129 of Friday 14 February 1794, covering the first two parts and part of the third, and was then suspended because a friend of Mutis undertook to publish it separately — an offer never made good. Mutis died in 1808 and the discourse waited until 1828 for a book of its own.
In the interval the text circulated under other names, and the editor names them: the Mercurio Peruano printed an incomplete extract of the Arcano in its number 608; Francisco Antonio Zea, a disciple of Mutis, published it as a "Memoria sobre la Quina" in the Anales de Historia Natural at Madrid in 1800; and "Mr. Roux", according to the same prologue, presented it to the National Convention of France as his own production. The last of these is a charge made in Madrid thirty years after the fact by a partisan editor and is repeated here as his allegation, not as a finding.
The same prologue states an indigenous priority in plain terms — the primitive quina "fué descubierta por los indios, y esperimentada por ellos mismos para curar las fiebres muchos años antes de nuestra conquista de las Américas" — and then tells the courtly version of the discovery: a corregidor of Loxa who had the bark from an Indian and tried it on himself in 1636, the gift in 1638 to the conde de Chinchón, the countess and the hospital of Lima, the Jesuits carrying it to Spain in 1640. The page carries its own warning labels: it concedes that it is still not settled which botanical species the primitive quina was, and it calls Chinchón viceroy "del nuevo reino de Granada" rather than of Peru.
The cost side is in the same apparatus, in figures. The royal pharmacy at Madrid was consuming three hundred arrobas of quina a year by 1808 against a hundred a year in 1788, twenty of them the King's gifts to foreign courts; and a reglamento of seventeen articles was formed in 1790 expressly to conserve "los montes de Loxa que se hallaban destruidos" and to make new plantings, with a corregidor and a botanist-chemist salaried to execute it. The forests that supplied the remedy were recorded as already wrecked before the century ended.
The 1828 volume is a layered document rather than a single voice, and it shows the seam. Mutis's discourse argues from the whole bark and its species; the editor's footnotes answer from the chemistry of the 1820s, reporting that sulphate of quinine is "directamente febrífugo" and as reliable in intermittents as the bark of Loxa taken whole, that the febrifuge power resides in the alkalis quinina and cinconina, and that Tilloy of Nantes had published on 7 August 1827 a nine-hour assay by which a bark yielding nine grains of quinine sulphate to the ounce could be bought with confidence. Readers of the 1828 book were getting a doctrine of 1793 with its refutation printed underneath it.
Mutis's scheme was contested in print by the rival royal expedition while he was alive. Hipólito Ruiz and Josef Pavón, botanists of the expedition to Peru, answered Zea's Madrid version of it in their Suplemento á la quinología of 1801, holding that until Mutis applied the name naranjada to his quina nervina "jamás se habia oido tal nombre en el Comercio de España, ni en la Medicina", and that the bark the King's commissioners had always sent from Loxa as the primitive and best was the cinnamon-coloured one. The dispute was never settled in the terms in which the two sides argued it.