It’s in vogue in some science communities online to poke fun at ‘natural’ cures, but it can’t be done without knowing some history. As much as we think of drug discovery as a sterile process that’s confined to test tubes and foil capped bottles, it’s messier than that.
Many of our pharmaceutical powerhouses came from some enterprising cave dweller who said “today’s the day I lick that goddamn tree.”
Today’s Moment of Science… the bark of barks, the tonic of gins.
Caused by the parasite plasmodium, malaria has likely been kicking around the planet since long before we got here. It’s been identified in preserved mosquitoes dating back about 30 million years. Mosquitos act as the host animal, with Plasmodium in the salivary glands waiting to come out and play when its designated driver finds a meal. With over 200 species of Plasmodium, there are plenty that will give you a nasty case of “oh fuck I’m gonna die.”
The term ‘malaria’ literally means ‘bad air.’ In the era of miasma theory when we believed that disease spread via bad smells and tainted air, malaria was the poster child of a disease that you seemed to get out of thin air. Because, as miasma theory coincided with the we-aren’t-bathing-regularly era, what could possibly hurt you in the air if it wasn’t the smell?
I did mention the mosquitos.
In South America, they didn’t know what exactly malaria was, what caused it, or how this mysterious plant did its business. Precisely when or how the discovery was made has long been relegated to legend. But we know the Quechua, native to the Andean highlands in Peru and Ecuador, were using extracts from cinchona tree bark to treat malaria long before Spanish colonizers arrived.
Also called the quinaquina tree, it roughly translates to ‘holy bark,’ or ‘bark of barks.” By the late 1600s, the bark’s extract was widely embraced as the go-to malaria cure. As we were a little behind on organic chemistry, it took until the 1800s for a couple of French chemists to identify the active compounds in the cinchona bark. There were several effective alkaloids useful for treating malaria, including cinchonine, cinchonidine, quinidine, and of course, quinine, being the most effective medicine of the group.
It saved countless lives. It maybe started an argument or two.
In the era of imperialism, its existence sparked a desperation to control the supply. For a long time, there was a monopoly out of South America. England and the Dutch wanted a piece of the action. They offered chemists a buttload of money to make it in house, but no dice. So when an alpaca farmer in Bolivia, Charles Ledger, offered them a bunch of conchina seeds that likely took a great deal of effort for his servant to scrounge up, you’d think they’d have offered him buttloads of money.
England was like “nah.”
The Dutch named the goddamn plant after him: the Cinchona ledgeriana.
It’s unclear if this is legend or not, but given how protective they were of their crop, the story goes that locals beat Ledger’s servant to death for giving away the seeds.
Regular access to quinine was a game changer. In the American Civil War, the Confederacy suffered immense losses from malaria and attempted with great futility to use other plant extracts to supplement their limited quinine access. It was consumed in tonics throughout the British Empire because it seemed to have a prophylactic effect against malaria (though it’s more accurate to say that they were likely getting infected and treating it all the time). And what better way to make a truly bitter medicine go down than a spoonful of sugar, a pop of fizz, and a shot of gin?
One of the more incredible things about quinine and malaria treatment today? Though it’s been supplanted by some chemical cousins, quinine is still used to treat malaria. One of the other main malaria treatments, artemisinin, is likewise derived from a plant, the sweet wormwood. Hundreds, if not thousands of years of managing this parasite, and licking the tree bark still kinda works.
This has been your Moment of Science, and your reminder that dosage is important, and though there’s quinine in your G&T, you’d need to drink about 12 liters of modern tonic for one dose of quinine treatment. I believe in you.
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