Quinine – From the Sacred Bark to a Wonder Drug
Chapter 2. The Miraculous Fever Tree
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In the 16th century, as part of the discovery and conquest of the New World, Spanish conquistadors arrived at Inca territory in South America, a place they called Peru, meaning the “land of abundance”. There were several legends regarding the discovery of the treatment for malaria.
One legend was about a beautiful Countess of Chinchon, who lay gravely ill with ague in the Viceroy’s Palace in Lima, Peru. Deeply worried, her husband, the Count of Chinchon, called the court physician to provide a remedy, but none was at hand. In desperation, the physician obtained a native substance, which was a red powder ground from the bark of a tree growing high in the Andes Mountains. The Countess recovered after taking the remedy, which was called “quina-quina”, by the Indian of Peru meaning “bark of barks”. When the Countess of Chinchon returned to her homeland Spain, she brought the red power with her, which came to be known in Europe as the “Countess’ powder”.
Many years later, a Swedish naturalist named the tree from which the bark was obtained Cinchona in her honor. Despite the spelling error (the first h from the name was left off), Cinchona remains enshrined as the name for the fever bark tree. The story of Countess of Chinchon was circulated for 300 years till the diary of the Count and viceroy was discovered in the early 20th century, which revealed that his wife never had malaria and had been in good health her entire time in Peru.
There is another legend, which goes with a fatally ill man with high fever. He was lost in the jungle. He drank water from a shallow pool and then fell asleep. When he woke up, he was cured. All he remembered was that the water he drank was awfully bitter and there were fallen cinchona trees lying in it. Although it was unclear if this legend remains true, the common part of the above two stories is that there was a miraculous fever tree that saved people’s lives.
The Peruvian trees, which has been called quina-quina, or most commonly today, Cinchona, grow in a narrow swath on the slopes and valleys of the Andes – they do not grow lower than 2,500 ft or higher than 9,000 ft above the sea level. The benefit of the bark of the Cinchona tree had long been recognized by indigenous peoples before the arrival of the Spanish. The original inhabitants drank a broth made from cinchona bark when they had shivers from the cold. When the Spanish Jesuits saw the natives using a particular bark to stop shivers, they made the connection: maybe the same ingredient of the bark could be used for the shivers caused by malaria, and they were right.
Spanish Jesuits brought the dried bark back to Rome in early 17th century, which is why it is also called “Jesuits powder” or “Jesuits bark”. The first written record in Europe about a “miraculous” malaria remedy discovered in the jungles of the New World appeared in 1630s, and samples of the Jesuits powder appeared in Europe around the same time. By the 1640s, Jesuits had established trade routes to deliver cinchona bark throughout Europe.
Cinchona bark was truly a game changing treatment. Based on the record, six cardinals died of malaria during the papal conclave in the 1620s. Thirty years later, not one cardinal died during the papal conclave. Because of the miraculous bark powder, 1655 was the first year when not one citizen of Rome died of malaria. As an Italian physician stated in 1650, “This bark has proven more precious to mankind than all the gold and silver the Spaniards obtained from South America”.
After reading here, you might think that, from the 1650s onward, no country in Europe would suffer from malaria since the trade routes of cinchona bark had been well established. Then you would be wrong. A few countries, including England, were against cinchona bark for many years, and they paid a deep price, at the cost of both lives and gold, prior to their final acceptance of Jesuits’ Bark; this interesting story is told in the next chapter.
[Written by Guohua An; Copyrighted content]