The history of cinchona has traditionally begun with the romantic - and now discredited - story of Francisca Henriquez Ribera, the Countess of Chinchon. According to legend, the Countess became seriously ill during an outbreak of fever in Lima around 1623. Her husband, the Viceroy, learning of a medicinal tree bark used by the local Indians, ordered the bark tested and administered to his wife. Following her prompt recovery, the Countess championed the use of bark among the general populace, and thousands of lives were saved. The drug became known as pulvis Comitissae, the powder of the Countess, and later - misspelled by Linnaeus - as cinchona. In Quinine's Predecessor Saul Jarcho unravels a tangle of myth, hearsay, and fact to establish the definitive history of cinchona bark - the still-important source of modern quinine. Jarcho explains the discovery of the healing property of the substance, also known as Peruvian bark or Jesuits' bark, and traces the routes by which it was transmitted from South America to Spain and other countries. He recounts the controversy and resistance surrounding its acceptance by medical practitioners. And he offers the most complete account to date of the important work of Francesco Torti, who used the bark successfully in treating cerebral and other especially dangerous malarial infections.

For more than 50 years, low-cost antimalarial drugs silently saved millions of lives and cured billions of debilitating infections. Today, however, these drugs no longer work against the deadliest form of malaria that exists throughout the world. Malaria deaths in sub-Saharan Africaâ€"currently just over one million per yearâ€"are rising because of increased resistance to the old, inexpensive drugs. Although effective new drugs called "artemisinins" are available, they are unaffordable for the majority of the affected population, even at a cost of one dollar per course. Saving Lives, Buying Time: Economics of Malaria Drugs in an Age of Resistance examines the history of malaria treatments, provides an overview of the current drug crisis, and offers recommendations on maximizing access to and effectiveness of antimalarial drugs. The book finds that most people in endemic countries will not have access to currently effective combination treatments, which should include an artemisinin, without financing from the global community. Without funding for effective treatment, malaria mortality could double over the next 10 to 20 years and transmission will intensify.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. What happens after colonial industries have run their course—after the factory closes and the fields go fallow? Set in the cinchona plantations of India’s Darjeeling Hills, Quinine’s Remains chronicles the history and aftermaths of quinine. Harvested from cinchona bark, quinine was malaria’s only remedy until the twentieth-century advent of synthetic drugs, and it was vital to the British Empire. Today, the cinchona plantations—and the roughly fifty thousand people who call them home—remain. Their futures, however, are unclear. The Indian government has threatened to privatize or shut down this seemingly obsolete and crumbling industry, but the plantation community, led by strident trade unions, has successfully resisted. Overgrown cinchona fields and shuttered quinine factories may appear the stuff of postcolonial and postindustrial ruination, but quinine’s remains are not dead. Rather, they have become the site of urgent efforts to redefine land and life for the twenty-first century. Quinine's Remains offers a vivid historical and ethnographic portrait of what it means to forge life after empire.

Literally Italian for "bad air," malaria once plagued Rome, tropical trade routes and colonial ventures into India and South America and the disease has no known antidote aside from the therapeutic effects of the "miraculous" quinine. This first book from journalist Honigsbaum is a rousing history of the search for febrifuge or, more specifically, the rare red cinchona tree, the bark from which quinine is derived.

This book describes the main issues of eighteenth-century pharmacology and therapeutics and provides detailed case studies of three key areas: lithontriptics (remedies against urinary stones), opium, and Peruvian bark (quinine).

In the eighteenth century, malaria was a prevalent and deadly disease, and the only effective treatment was found in the Andean forests of Spanish America: a medicinal bark harvested from cinchona trees that would later give rise to the antimalarial drug quinine. In 1751, the Spanish Crown asserted control over the production and distribution of this medicament by establishing a royal reserve of "fever trees" in Quito. Through this pilot project, the Crown pursued a new vision of imperialism informed by science and invigorated through commerce. But ultimately this project failed, much like the broader imperial reforms that it represented. Drawing on extensive archival research, Matthew Crawford explains why, showing how indigenous healers, laborers, merchants, colonial officials, and creole elites contested European science and thwarted imperial reform by asserting their authority to speak for the natural world. The Andean Wonder Drug uses the story of cinchona bark to demonstrate how the imperial politics of knowledge in the Spanish Atlantic ultimately undermined efforts to transform European science into a tool of empire.