The Lady of the Camellias and the Philippines

MANILA, Philippines - The Filipinos have all reasons to be proud of the name ‘Camellia’ as it has its origin in Intramuros – but only very few people know about i.

The Philippines has a population of approximately 100 million. How many of them know the name of the flower “camellia”. I would say nearly all of them, from Philippine school children to their grandparents. How many are aware that this worldwide known name has its roots in Manila? I dare to say less than 100 people in the Philippines.

As a passionate historian, I wrote a book on Austro-Philippine relations and came across an interesting story mentioned in an old Austrian history book about a German speaking Jesuit missionary in Manila named Georg Joseph KAMEL. His name is sometimes written KAMMEL. He was born on April 21, 1661 in Bruenn (Brno) in Moravia, then part of the Austrian empire, today the Czech Republic. He died on May 2, 1706 in Manila. He would be a citizen of the EU today. Let us therefore call him a European Jesuit missionary. As it was a fashion in his time to latinize the names, he often used his latin name Georgius Josephus CAMELLUS.

He attended high school in his hometown in Moravia and underwent education as a pharmacist in Southern Bohemia before he was hired by the Jesuits (ca. 1682) as a medical specialist for oversea missions.

The Spanish Jesuits were generally very keen to exclude foreign missiona-ries from the Philippines, but they were in urgent need of medical specialists as so many of their brothers died because of unknown tropical illnesses. They, therefore, explicitly asked their German Jesuit brothers to send them specialists in the field of pharmacy and medicine for the missionary services.

Georg Joseph Kamel was sent (via Mexico) first to the Marianas (Guam) in 1683 (according to other sources in 1687). While it is not clear how long he stayed in the Marianas (the archipelago is by the way named after Mariana de Austria) ,we have proof that he was transferred to Manila in the year 1688.

He established the first pharmacy in the Philippines (in San Ignacio, Intramuros) and operated it according to the standards of the Austrian rules for pharmacies. Kamel also worked as a medical doctor. Poor people could receive herbs and medical treatment for free. He established a garden for medical herbs which he called “hortus domesticus” and he also learned Tagalog very well. Additionally he showed a keen private interest in botany. He started to dry and to draw and to register flowers and herbs etc. He was the first scientific botanist in the Philippines. As he was very popular among the local people, men and women from all over the country brought him plants and herbs which he had not seen before. He was also interested in animals and wrote the first account about the birds of the Philippines (in 1702).

Why is his name still known today? – I have to make references to three different circumstances in three different countries to explain this interesting story.

1. India: Mr. Samuel Brown in Madras was a medical doctor deeply interested in botany. Working for the British East India Company, he had heard about the botanic work of Georg Joseph Kamel in Manila as seafarers from the Philippines told stories about a man in Manila who was collecting all plants and herbs. Brown and Kamel started to exchange letters (ca. 1690). Kamel sent him some samples of dried and pressed plants. Brown was fascinated and informed the leading English botanists John Ray and James Petiver about Kamel’s work in the Philippines.

2. England: John Ray and James Petiver in London began a direct correspondence with Kamel in Manila. The most precious shipment of plants and botanical illustrations fell into the hands of Chinese pirates and was destroyed by them. Kamel complained in his letters to London that he speaks German, Spanish, Tagalog and Latin but that he would not understand English very well. They finally came along with their language difficulties. Kamel sent more drawings and samples to London, Ray and Petiver were totally fascinated. He was usually called “Father Camel” in the English letters (but he was a laybrother). Kamel published a summary of his botanic findings in latin and sent it to England: Herbarium aliarumque stirpium in insula Luzone Philippinarum (“Herbs and Medicinal Plants in the island of Luzon, Philippines”).

John Ray (1627 –1705) was an English naturalist sometimes referred to as the father of English natural history. Among many other books he published a three volume standard works of his time on botany on the general history of plants: Historia generalis plantarum (3 vols., 1686, 1688, 1704). The (Latin) book of Kamel was published as an appendix to the 3rd volume in 1704.

Two years later Georg Joseph Kamel died in Manila on May 2,1706 caused by an intestinal infection. He was probably buried in the Jesuit monastery of San Ignacio in Intramuros, I did not find his grave yet.

Nobody would remember his name in 2012 but there is also a step 3.

3. Sweden: Nearly 50 years later the Swedish botanist Carl Linné (Latin name Carl Linnaeus.) published his famous two-volume work Genera Plantarum (The Species of Plants) in 1753. Different expressions for the same plants used to be a source of endless confusion in scientific botany. Linné was determined to create unified Latin expressions for all known plants. His book from 1753 is considered to be the primary starting point of plant nomenclature as it exists today. In the book he listed all plants known to him and gave them standardized names. He, of course, knew the book of John Ray and therefore knew about Georg Joseph Kamel’s work too.

In honor of the great scientific achievements of Georg Joseph Kamel he named a flower “Camellia”. The camellia is an Asian flower, it was first brought to Europe by Portuguese seafarers in the 16th century and soon became very popular. The word with reference to the old-Austrian Jesuit missionary in Manila is used in most western languages today, including in English, German, French, Spanish, Russian, Italian etc. etc. etc. Billions (!) of the world population, therefore, know his name still today. In 1848 Alexander Dumas wrote his famous novel “The Lady of the Camellias” (“La Dame aux camellias”), his story was used in 1853 for the famous opera “La Traviata” by Guiseppe Verdi etc. etc.. The camellia is also the official state flower of Alabama.

Irony of fate: Kamel was never dealing specifically with research work on the camellia itself. Linné had just chosen one popular Asian flower to honor the scientific achievements of Kamel in the field of botany.

Kamel’s historic legacy: according to my knowledge there are some 650 botanical illustrations which were created by Kamel in Manila in two locations in Europe, they would deserve much more attention. (There are two sets of these drawings as duplicates of most of them were made, copied by hand).

1. The collection owned by John Ray and James Petiver was donated to the Museum of Natural History in London. It is still in its collections today (with samples of dried plants from the Philippines from the 17th century). The remarks on the drawings are partially handwritten in Tagalog by Mr. Kamel.

2. The duplicates (including at least also some originals created by Kamel) were later auctioned on the art market and bought by the French botanist Antoine Laurent de Jussieu. Later they were resold again and bought by the Jesuit College in Leuven in Belgium where they are still located today. (Kamel’s remarks in Tagalog were hand copied in these sheets too).

Literature: There is only one book about Kamel (written in the German language in 1954) by Josef and Renée Gicklhorn, two historians who did great research work on the history of pharmacy. “Georg Joseph Kamel S. J. Apotheker, Botaniker, Arzt und Naturforscher der Philippineninseln”, Eutin 1954. The book is out of print for decades. The CV of Mr. Kamel is also summarized in a book on German pharmacists in Latin America (sic!) by Renée Gicklhorn “Missionsapotheker. Deutsche Pharmazeuten im Lateinamerika des 17. Und 18. Jahrhunderts”, Stuttgart 1973. This book is out of print too. Renee Gicklhorn calls Mr. Kamel the most important pharmacist in the 17th century.

Today no single name in Manila gives credit to its great son Georg Joseph Kamel who worked and died in Intramuros from where his name went into the world and came back to the Philippines in the form of a worldwide known name of a beautiful flower, the camellia. It should be the flower of Intramuros where at least a street or a place could be named after this great European missionary who became a great Pinoy.