The Abbe Molina, the smallpox… and also Darwin

Abstract

The Chilean Abbe Ignacio Molina (1740-1829) developed a brilliant career as naturalist in the University of Bologna, where he arrived when the Jesuit Order was expelled from the Spanish colonies in 1767, until he was accused of heresy because some ideas about evolution expressed in one of his late works, at the same time with Lamarck and 44 years before Darwin. In his youth Molina was affected in a severe way by smallpox, leaving us in two poems a vivid story of his suffering, not only by the disease itself but also for the useless therapeutic measures, some disagreeable, like enemas; other injurious, as bleeding and topic vinegar of the four thieves. A handful of the more significant verses from the two Latin Elegies "De peste variolarum" and "De peste variolis vulgo dicta" is analyzed: its literary value is scarce, its reading is bored, and its real merit only historic.