Salt of the Bark That Heals You

Cinchona or Peruvian bark contains the alkaloid compound quinine, which is an effective treatment for the life-threatening disease malaria. Quinine works by disrupting the reproduction cycle of the Plasmodium, a parasite transmitted by the bite of the female Anopheles mosquito. In 2015, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated there to be 214 million cases of malaria worldwide. In that same year, they estimated there to be 438,000 deaths, which represents a 48% decline since 2000. The development of new medications, mosquito eradication, and other preventative efforts like insecticide-treated mosquito nets, promoted and implemented by the WHO and other organizations, will maintain this encouraging downward trend.

Although knowledge of malaria’s etiology was not discovered until 1880, when Dr. Charles Laveran identified the Plasmodium parasite in the red blood cells of infected patients, and although it was not until 1898 that Sir Ronald Ross determined that the mosquito was the vector for the disease’s transmission, the use of Peruvian bark as a medicine was already known in the sixteenth century, if not earlier, and its first recorded use against malaria occurred in the early 1630s. Less known, however, is how the curative properties of this plant were first discovered, but it isn’t for a lack of imagination, as can be surmised from the excerpted texts on this page.

The most frequently transmitted story of the medicine’s discovery is also the source for the plant’s genus name. Carl Linnæus denominated the tree Cinchona after Ana de Osorio, the wife of the fourth Count of Chinchón, Luis Fernández, the Spanish Viceroy of Peru. Linnæus named it after her because she was the first to draw attention to the bark’s curative properties. The Countess was suffering from a terrible fever, which no known remedy abated. Hearing of her illness, the governor of the nearby city of Loxa sent over some of the bark and directions for its administration. Before the Countess took the unfamiliar medicine, she ordered another sick patient to test it first. Who this patient was is not known; however, in a Roman fresco that depicts this story, that first experimentee is an Indian messenger who did not die from the bark, but was cured and lived, as did the Countess. After her convalescence, she ordered and distributed what came to be known as the “the countess’s powder” throughout the New World, eventually returning with it to Spain.

Yet, the veracity of this story is highly suspect. In fact, the whole thing is likely a fabrication. In the early nineteenth century, Alexander von Humboldt already challenged the narrative, and all historians since have followed suit. The evidence against it consists in the notebooks of the Viceroy: he makes no mention of his wife’s miraculous cure, nor do any of the other European writers living in South America at the time.

Linnæus’ conferral of this name, then, is not without its problems, which are further complicated by the following two points. First, this plant’s new name completely supplanted the indigenous one, an event that is by no means unique in this case but applicable to countless others. Second, he misspelled the name, a more-than-likely unintentional mistake that recorded Cinchona instead of Chinchón. Nonetheless, the misspelling, in addition to the loss of the indigenous name, effectively severed the plant from its native habitat. While eighteenth-century scientific efforts intended to produce a universal language, in which any animal, plant, or mineral would be known by the same name everywhere in the world, that universality would be won only through the exclusion of diversity. (For an excellent analysis of this “linguistic imperialism,” see Londa Schiebinger’s Plants and Empire, which informs much of the present account.)

The indigenous name, or, at least, one possible indigenous name is not altogether lost. According to Charles Marie de La Condamine, quinquina is the Quechua word for the tree, a name that is preserved, of course, in the name for the anti-malarial agent, quinine. Condamine recorded the name during his expedition to the equatorial regions of South America in 1735, which he undertook with the esteemed botanist, Joseph de Jussieu. The expedition had been commissioned by the Parisian Royal Academy of Sciences in order to measure the length of a degree of meridian near the equator, which would yield the Earth’s size and shape when put into comparison with another taken at the Arctic Circle. Condamine’s own research into the plant’s name found that an earlier one, quinai, was already out of use and that the current quinquina was likely a linguistic mixture resulting from the influx of Spanish. In the end, Condamine thought quinquina best translated as “bark of bark.” (Doubling of this kind was not uncommon in the language, and especially not so in plant names). What does “bark of bark” mean? Condamine interpreted it as “the bark par excellence” (1737, p. 240).

Jussieu, Condamine’s companion on the very same expedition, recorded a different name and history: Yaracucchu Carachucchu. Yara means tree, cara bark, and chuccu the shivers that result from a fever. This name attested that the medicinal properties of this plant were likely known prior to the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, but this history was not something unanimously believed. In fact, in the eighteenth century and beyond, one of two beliefs was often held. Either the indigenous peoples knew about the drug and hid it from Europeans, or Europeans discovered something that had been unknown to them.

Tales of discovery, like the one involving the Countess, existed to support either side. Several tales abound in which a thirsty, malarial European happens to drink from a body of water infused with the bark, thereby learning the secret of Cinchona. Jussieu recounts the other kind of story. He attributes the drug’s discovery to an Indian chief who took pity on a fever-stricken Jesuit priest and cured him with the bark. If the indigenous Americans already knew of the bark, as Jussieu’s story implies, then how did they learn about it?

Condamine relates another narrative in which Americans first learned of the drug by observing fever-stricken lions that were cured after drinking from a lake into which Cinchona trees had fallen. Humboldt rejects this version because lions, he says, neither live in the region, nor do they get feverish. His challenge, however, does not preclude the possibility that Americans had observed some other animal suffering from an illness cured by drinking from a Chinchona infused water source and thus discovered this powerful cure

And it is powerful. In more ways than one.

Having a supply of the anti-malarial quinine has been essential to sustaining the imperial ambitions of several nations. Lucille Brockway illustrates Cinchona’s “utility to the Empire of the botanical network” in her book, Science and Colonial Expansion (p. 103). Specifically, she details the Cinchona transfer, in which Britain prospected Peruvian bark trees in South America that were then dispatched to Kew Gardens in England and transshipped to South India in the nineteenth century.

Joseph Banks had already had the idea to transfer Cinchona to India much earlier, but it was not pursued, which might have been due to technical limitations. The transport of living plants and seeds across the globe was quite difficult, fairly unreliable, and often a failure (cf. Dionaea muscipula). The Wardian case, a sealed protective glass container developed in the early nineteenth century, resolved this technical difficulty, even if glass cases did not prove to be the best option when traversing the Andean terrain (moistened calico was used to make improvised Wardian cases). With the idea of transfer in the air and technical difficulties now manageable, the transfer still did not begin in earnest until the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Why, then, did it take so long to begin? And what initiated the Cinchona transfer once it did? Brockway identifies the underlying catalyst in the Sepoy Revolt of 1857, when Indians rebelled against the British East India Company because the army’s orders and practices continually violated cultural, religious, and caste taboos, in addition to widespread unrest already fomenting in the country. While the Sepoy Revolt was not the first rebellion against the British, it is often hailed as India’s first struggle for independence. The Revolt lasted 18 months, and its effect were numerous and significant. Important to the present discussion is the fact that Britain reacted by strengthening its military forces. They reorganized their armies in India, raising the ratio of British to Indian troops and restricting the control of the artillery to British soldiers. Crucial, too, was the health of its troops and civil servants. They needed to protect them, first and foremost, against malaria. This undertaking required a large, reliable supply of quinine, which would have been unfeasible and too expensive if imports were relied upon. Hence, in 1858 the Cinchona transfer gained the widespread support it needed to begin in earnest.

By 1860, the Nilgiri Hills in South India were chosen as the site of the first Cinchona plantation. In the first three years, 250,000 trees were planted; by 1891, there were 1.8 million. These botanical efforts were motivated by the thought that the control of India could only be sustained by first gaining control of malaria.

This thinking extended far beyond Britain’s struggle for control in India, playing a prominent role, for example, in the the empire established by the U.S. in the Caribbean in the twentieth century (see J. R. McNeill’s analysis in Mosquito Empires). For a long time now, the Cinchona tree has extended far beyond its Peruvian origins, acting as a complex protagonist responsible both for freeing people from the life-threatening grips of malaria as well as abetting the imperial ambitions of colonial powers.