Quinine – From the Sacred Bark to a Wonder Drug
Chapter 1. The Roman Fever
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It was an ancient disease. The earliest records were written more than 3,000 years ago in the Nei Jing (the earliest Chinese medical book) and the Ebers Papyrus of ancient Egypt, describing the typical symptoms of enlarged spleen, periodic fevers, headache, chills, and fever. The disease had many names, such as intermittent fever, marsh fever, or simply “the fever”.
Hippocrates (460-370 BC), a Greek physician, observed that during the harvest time (late summer and autumn) when Sirius, the Dog Star, was dominant in the night sky, fever and misery soon followed. He also noticed that people living near swamps and marshes often suffered from the disease. As the disease was rampant in Rome, the eternal city surrounded by marshland and bogs, it was also called the “Roman fever”. It was believed that this fever came from vapors in the swamps during the sickly summer season. Accordingly, Romans called it ‘mal’aria’, literally “bad air” in Medieval Italian. Malaria, the name we call the disease today, was unknown in the English language until it was introduced in mid-18th century by an English historian, who during a visit to Rome wrote, “There is a horrid thing called mal’aria that comes to Rome every summer and kills one”.
For a person who suffers through a cycle of malaria attack, what does it feel like? The most vivid description probably was from Ryszard Kapuscinski, a distinguished journalist and writer, who got malaria and described the disease in his book The Shadow of the Sun:
“… If you believe in spirits, you know what it is: someone has pronounced a curse, and an evil spirit has entered you, disabling you and rooting you to the ground. Hence the dullness, the weakness, the heaviness that comes over you. Everything is irritating... …. It is a sudden, violent onset of cold. A polar, arctic cold. Someone has taken you, naked, toasted in the hellish heat of the Sahel and the Sahara and has thrown you straight into the icy highlands of Greenland or Spitsbergen, amid the snows, winds, and blizzards. …. these tremors and convulsions tossing you around are of a kind that any moment now will tear you to shreds..”
Malaria was a terrible disease. Without treatment, it could be deadly. Malaria was not only one of the most ancient diseases but also probably one of the worst that ever hit mankind. It killed people indistinctively: aristocrats, warriors, peasants, cardinals, even Popes. As Goffredo da Viterbo, a Roman Catholic chronicler, wrote in 1167, “When unable to defend herself by the sword, Rome could defend herself by means of the fever”.
For centuries, Europe, Asia, and Africa were ravaged by the terrible marsh fevers, and no one knew exactly what caused the disease, let alone how to treat it. One of the popular medieval treatments involved a sweet apple and an incantation to the three kings who followed the star to Bethlehem: “Cut the apple into three parts. In the first part, write the words Ave Gaspari. In the second write Ave Balthasar, and in the third write Ave Melchior. Then eat each segment early on three consecutive mornings and recite three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys”. Another type of medieval cure was passing the disease to animals - for example, a sheep was brought into the bedroom of a fever patient, and holy chants were recited to transfer the illness from the human to the beast. Unfortunately, these popular treatments, without surprise, brought no success.
For a long time, there was no remedy, no cure. At that time, no one knew that, actually, there was a remedy, which our mother nature had placed in a land where had never been reached by malaria, a land waiting for people from the old world to discover. The cure for malaria was hidden in the rainforest’s dense jungles of the New World, as the story unfolds in the next chapter.
[Written by Guohua An; Copyrighted content]