Medicine: Quinine’s Tercentenary

Because a Spaniard in Peru discovered just 300 years ago that crude quinine cured malaria, most devastating of diseases the world over,** a small group of learned botanists and pharmacologists met in St. Louis last week to celebrate.

A vast amount of knowledge has accumulated about malaria. The Anopheline mosquito bites a person and injects the malaria organism, a protozoon about one-fifth the size of a red blood cell. The protozoon gets into a red cell where it grows and reproduces (by subdivision) until it literally bursts its host. Its offspring invades other cells. While the protozoa are in their reproductive stage, the typical chills & fever of malaria develop. Quinine is a poison for malaria organisms. It kills them while they are in the blood cells (except when they are reproducing). Thus quinine is a specific antidote for malaria.

Peruvian Indians did not know the pharmacology of quinine. But they did know that the bark of a certain tree, from which quinine is derived, cured their malaria. They told their lore to a friendly magistrate, Juan Lopez Canizares, when in 1630 he developed the disease. He passed the information to Countess of Chinchon, wife of Peru’s then viceroy, when she fell victim. It was after her that the cinchona tree and its quinine derivatives was named.:‡

**”It has been estimated that directly or in directly . . . [malaria] is responsible for more than half of the deaths of the human race.”—Professor Herbert Harold Waite of the University of Nebraska, in his Disease Prevention. However, prime U. S. killers are heart disease, cancer, pneumonia.

‡The Dutch transplanted cinchona trees to Java in 1854, now produce about 95% of the world’s quinine. The British, from transplants to India, produce most of the rest. The Soviets, to economize on quinine, forbid its use as an appetizer, abortifacient or anything but a malaria antidote.