Camelia

The camelia is a beautiful flower, also known as Japan rose. It has become famous in literature because of a novel by Alexandre Dumas entitled The Lady of the Camelias.

The name camelia was given to the flower by the great Swedish botanist Linnaeus (Carl von Linné) to honor a Jesuit lay brother who lived and died in Manila. His name was Georg Josef Kamel.

A brief biography of Kamel is given in that encyclopedic work of four enormous volumes recently published in Madrid and Rome, entitled Diccionario Biográfico de la Compañia de Jesus.

He was born in 1661 in Brno in Moravia (part of what was later called Czechoslovakia). He studied to become a pharmacist and then entered the Jesuit Order as a lay brother. Assigned to the Philippines he became the infirmarian of the Jesuit College of Manila, at that time located in Intramuros near the Puerta Real, the site of what today is the Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila. In the patio of the college he cultivated a herbal garden and studied their medicinal properties. His homemade medicines became so well-known that his fame reached the ears of a British physician in Madras, India, named Samuel Browne. Browne alerted the Royal Society of London – in particular two of its scientists, John Ray and James Petiver – about the work of Kamel – or "Camel" as they came to know him, because the Spanish Jesuits in Manila had changed the name Georg Kamel to Jorge Camel.

Brother Camel wrote his articles in Latin. (Almost all scholarly work at that time was in Latin. Descartes the philosopher, Newton the physicist, Copernicus and Galileo the astro-nomers, all wrote in Latin, as later would Linnaeus the botanist.) And it was in Latin that Brother Camel’s works were published in London under the auspices of the Royal Society. They did not deal only with herbs. Brother Camel was more than a botanist. He was really what was then known as a "natural historian". He wrote about Philippine birds, fish, seashells, corals. And he sent not only articles. He also sent to London specimens of Philippine plants, butterflies and other animals – including (it is said) the skin of a python 30 meters long. If that number is accurately reported, it must have been some snake!

Among the plants Camel sent to London was a bean to which he gave the name of St. Ignatius Loyola. He called it Strychnos Ignatii (in Spanish, habichuela de San Ignacio). Strychnine is said to have been "discovered" in the 19th century: but a century and a half earlier, Brother Camel had already known the medicinal properties of the plant.

Brother Camel died in Manila in 1706. The following year in Sweden the great Linnaeus was born. He was to become famous as the inventor of the modern systematic classification of genera and species. In his botanical studies he came across the Latin works of Brother Jorge Camel (published in London) and it was to honor his memory that Linnaeus gave the name camelia to a flower.