How the Cinchona tree took on malaria
It's easy to miss this thin evergreen tree in the dense vegetation of its natural habitat. Although indigenous people in South America had long known of its usefulness against various fevers, no one quite knows exactly how its ability to cure malaria was discovered. The story, most believe, goes back to the 15th century when Spanish colonisers and their slaves first arrived in South America, bearing the malaria-causing parasite in their bodies. Soon, bloodthirsty mosquitoes were spreading the disease and scores of people began dying of it.
Respite
Quinine, a chemical compound found in the bark of the Cinchona, offered a treatment and the indigenous people, who had long used it to treat various ailments, most likely passed on this remedy to the Christian missionaries or Jesuits, who had followed the colonisers into South America. Not surprisingly, Jesuit physicians pioneered the use of the Cinchona bark as a cure for malaria in Western medicine. In time, stories of the miracle cure began doing the rounds. In fact, the Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus named the tree after a story of the Count of Chinchón — the Spanish Viceroy in Lima, Peru — who had been cured of malaria by it.
By the end of the 16th century, this little South American tree was being mercilessly axed and transported to Europe in Spanish ships. Demand for quinine had soared, as European colonisers had spread their tentacles into mosquito-ridden tropical lands around the world. By the beginning of the 19th century, South American countries had banned the export of Cinchona seeds and saplings to maintain its monopoly over this priceless cure for malaria. However, importing quinine from South America was proving to be far too expensive for the other European empires. So, in a secret operation, plant hunters smuggled the seeds out of Peru and Bolivia and took them to British botanical gardens in England and India. Meanwhile, the Dutch began growing Cinchona plantations in Indonesia.
For centuries, Cinchona remained the only source of quinine. It made it possible for Europeans to establish thriving tropical empires. Technological advances in the 20th century, however, allowed humans to produce artificial quinine and also uncover other cures for malaria. Finally, Cinchona could go back to being just a tree and was spared from the greed that had nearly decimated it.
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