An unauthorized timeline of quinine

For the impact it has had globally in the last five centuries, the cinchona tree has remained notoriously obscure. This cosmopolitan plant, once endemic to the Andean region (in today’s Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Colombia), is almost extinct there. Plantations are still found in Africa and Asia. First and foremost, the fame of the cinchona tree is owed to its medicinal properties to treat fevers. Crucially, its bark contains an alkaloid called quinine. This elusive substance was once the only known cure for malaria, and therefore turned into an extremely valuable commodity that shaped empires’ and new nations’ fates and fortunes. The introduction of quinine marks the beginning of modern pharmacology. It also exemplifies the pattern of knowledge robbery that would be followed since.

Cinchona has been notoriously reticent to make expose itself to modern science. From the difficulty to identify the tree by name (quina, cascarillo, azuceno, ayac cara, yara chucchu, quinquino, and fever tree are but a few), to enlist the different species (only recently ‘solved’ with DNA techniques) to the inability to understand the mechanisms with which quinine disables the malaria parasite (scientists can only claim that ‘it just works’), little is known about the real events that brought Western science in contact with it, while the original knowledges that came before were actively destroyed. Regarding malaria, contemporary discourse follows the epidemiological perspective to focus on mosquitos as the vector of transmission, thus blurring a more holistic, nuanced understanding on the disease and its treatments. In the following pages, an unruly sequence of landmark events will lay out an alternative, Southern counter-history around the cinchona tree.

Juan Arturo García

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ca. 1663‍

Original myths‍

The best evidence that medicine historians have been able to produce on the pre-Columbian knowledge about cinchona is actually the legend of the Countess of Chinchón and how she was cured from the fevers. The story was first registered by Sebastiano Bado in 1663. According to him, Bado received notice from another Italian merchant, Antonius Bollus, who had lived in Lima and told the story on the disease of the Countess “some thirty or forty years ago”.

Bollus specifically mentions that “the bark was already known to the indians and they used it on themselves when sick. However, they tried, with all means at their disposal, to prevent the remedy to fall in the hands of the Spaniards.” On the other hand, it is generally acknowledged that the Jesuits were the first to discover the properties of cinchona.

1764
Filling the gap‍

On September 24, 1764, José Celestino Mutis, an aspiring Spanish botanist living in New Granada, but unknown in the European scientific circles, sends a letter to Carl Linnæus in which, among other things, lamented that the Seven Years’ War prevented his previous letters to ever reach Sweden.

Mutis, well versed in the Linnaean oeuvre, noted that the “Prince of Botany” had published in 1754 a generic description of Cinchona, but there were no indications that Linnæus inspected a real specimen. To fill this void, and more emphatically, to earn his favor, Mutis sent a botanical
drawing of the plant, along with dried leaves and flowers from a cinchona tree. These are archived at the Linnaean Society in London.

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1776
A new discovery, allegedly‍

In 1776, Mutis wrote to the viceroy, claiming that he had already discovered a region of cinchona trees outside Bogotá. It was strategically located near the Magdalena river, the fastest route to the port of Cartagena, the waterway to Spain, and that he had reported to the previous viceroy about his findings in 1772.

About this alleged ‘discovery’ there is no record, being its only evidence the aforementioned letter, written four years later, and only after Sebastian José López Ruiz, a Panamanian botanist, had publicly claimed the same discovery. The overlap of these accounts set the stage for a crucial grudge in the history of botany and scientific development in Latin America.

1801
Mutis greets Humboldt

On the 8th of July of 1801, Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland arrived in Santa Fe de Bogotá. They were welcomed by a large parade that escorted them from the edges of the city to the house of José Celestino Mutis: “In Santa Fe, the expectation for our arrival was singularly excited. I had written from Turbaco to the famous Mutis that the mere desire to meet him and admire his work had moved me to prefer the road through Popayán to the immensely shorter one through Panamá and Guayaquil. This sacrifice moved Mr. Mutis and his friends to mobilize everything in their power to provide us with an honorable reception. They had placed boats all along the way from Guaduas, to know the day of our arrival.”

The aforementioned López Ruiz exposed his case on the discovery of cinchona to Humboldt, looking to finally put an end to the controversy. To his surprise, the reply he got in a letter from Humboldt, that “the frankness which is natural to my nation, and to my character,” forced him to side with “the celebrated naturalist of Santa Fe with whom I am bound, by the closest ties, of friendship and gratitude.”

Adding insult to injury, he concluded his letter by stating that “the effect of a discovery on the public good, is the one that interests us most. The most remote posterity will remember those who, out of patriotic zeal, sacrifice their own interests to the good of their fellow citizens.”

1851–1880
Breaking monopolies‍

The newly independent republics of Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and Bolivia jealously guarded their monopoly of the crucial Cinchona trees. Strict export restrictions were imposed on seeds and plants, while gaining significant profits from exporting the bark. European powers, particularly France, Great Britain and the Netherlands, needed the bark and wanted to break the South American monopoly. Several expeditions of plant hunters were dispatched to get hold of Cinchona seeds and plants, often by smuggling them out illegally, to be replanted in colonial plantations, as was the case in British India and Java.

Point in case being C.F. Pahud, the Dutch Minister of Colonies, who in 1851 decided to send the German botanist Justus Karl Hasskarl to southern Peru to collect as many cinchona seeds and plants as possible. Barely a year later, the first cinchona plant was introduced in the mountain garden of Cibodas near the Botanical Garden in Buitenzorg on Java in 1852.

In 1865 Charles Ledger, an Englishman, obtained sixteen pounds of seed from a Bolivian servant named Manuel Incra Mamani. After being caught by the police, Mamani was jailed, beaten, and eventually starved to death for his act. A pound of this seed was sold to the Dutch, for a fee of about 20 dollars. By 1930, through a process of trial and error, Dutch state-sponsored pharmacists and chemists in the plantations in Java produced 22 million pounds of bark, yielding 97 percent of the world's quinine.

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1881–1914
Cracking the white man’s grave

Quinine played a significant role in the colonization of Africa by Europeans. The availability of quinine for treatment had been said to be the prime reason Africa ceased to be known as the “white man’s grave.” Historian Jack Weatherford noted that “it was quinine’s efficacy that gave colonists fresh opportunities to swarm into the Gold Coast, Nigeria and other parts of west Africa.”

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1890–1910
Racist chemistry

The production and distribution of pure quinine or its substitutes stoked various narratives of racial discrimination. *Cinchona febrifuge*, for example, was considered too ‘crude and coarse’ to suit for the delicate constitutions of European soldiers serving in British India. In contrast, following a recommendation in 1880, Indian laboring convicts were not only forced to consume the same drug every day, but as an effective cost-cutting measure, on each such occasion they were denied their daily milk ration.

The perceived material configuration of pure quinine closely indicate how scientific racism and ‘commodity racism’ converged and sustained one another. Pure quinine was projected consistently in official sources as a ‘white substance’ which crystallized as ‘beautiful, long needles’, was bitter in taste and had a sweet smell. This metaphorical correlation of whiteness with purity is particularly striking considering impure quinine was frequently associated with yellow and brown.

1913
Cinchona Agreement

The signing of the Cinchona Agreement in 1913 between 122 cinchona producers in the Netherlands Indies and the seven major quinine manufacturers assembled in the quinine cartel. The objective of the Cinchona Agreement was to improve the prices by gaining control over the worldwide production and distribution of cinchona and quinine by matching the production of cinchona bark directly with the sales of quinine and bring stability to the highly speculative cinchona and quinine market. In 1913 the Agreement was put into force and established the Cinchona Bureau, creating the world’s first pharmaceutical cartel.

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1923
Propaganda bureau‍

In 1923, the Cinchona Bureau founded the “Bureau for the Increasing Use of Quinine” (*Bureau ter Bevordering van het Kininegebruik*). By the early 1920s, demand for quinine had stagnated and the Cinchona Bureau decided to restrict the production of cinchona bark in the Netherlands Indies. The cinchona producers reluctantly accepted this decision, because they were promised a marketing department (“Propaganda bureau”) that would be set up within the Cinchona Bureau to stimulate the sales of quinine sulfate and quinine and hence the demand for cinchona bark.

1942–1945
The Cinchona Missions‍

During World War II, Allied powers were cut off from their supply of quinine when Germany conquered the Netherlands, and Japan controlled the Philippines and Indonesia. Tens of thousands of US troops in Africa and the South Pacific died of malaria due to the lack of quinine. Despite controlling the supply, the Japanese did not make effective use of quinine, and thousands of Japanese troops in the southwest Pacific died as a result. The Cinchona Missions (1942–1945) were a series of expeditions led by the United States to find new natural sources of quinine in South America.

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2015
A matter of perspectives

Europe and the United States are the first regions in the world to be declared malaria-free, in 2015. The leading and historical producers of cinchona bark (Africa and Latin America) are still the regions most affected by the disease.

This visual essay was first published in Intermittent Fevers (2023), a project and book by Stichting Prom Run.