When stationed in Manila, the Jesuit pharmacist and missionary Georg Joseph Kamel (1661-1706) produced extensive accounts about Philippine flora, which were later printed in Europe. Drawing on the example of the St Ignatius bean, a medicinal plant native to the Philippines monopolised by the Jesuit order, I will explore Kamel’s strategies in mobilising local materia medica from the indigenous into a European context. I will argue that in introducing the ‘Jesuit bean’ to his European readers, Kamel downplayed its novelty and identified it with the nux vomica of the medieval Arabian physician Serapion, whose work had been adopted into European traditions centuries ago. This association endowed the plant with a clear place within European frameworks of knowledge, as well as with specific virtues: nux vomica means literally a ‘vomitory nut’. To bolster this carefully constructed link, Kamel provided accounts of medical cases which clearly attested to the emetic qualities of the plant. Perfectly blending erudite and empirical evidence, Kamel thus managed to smoothly transplant the St Ignatius bean into Europe. I will briefly contrast these Jesuit efforts to mobilise indigenous remedies and introduce them on the European market with those of the Spanish empire, which struggled to exploit local natural resources with such efficiency. I will suggest that – at least in the late seventeenth-century Philippines – Jesuit motivations, networks and modus operandi were more strongly aligned with extraction and exploitation of indigenous knowledge than the concerns and inner workings of the Spanish empire.
