A rich and wonderful history of quinine - the cure
for malaria. In the summer of 1623, ten cardinals and
hundreds of their attendants, engaged in electing a new
Pope, died from the 'mal'aria' or 'bad air' of the Roman
marshes. Their choice, Pope Urban VIII, determined that
a cure should be found for the fever that was the
scourge of the Mediterranean, northern Europe and
America, and in 1631 a young Jesuit apothecarist in Peru
sent to the Old World a cure that had been found in the
New - where the disease was unknown. The cure was
quinine, an alkaloid made of the bitter red bark of the
cinchona tree, which grows in the Andes. Both disease
and cure have an extraordinary history. Malaria badly
weakened the Roman Empire. It killed thousands of
British troops fighting Napoleon during the Walcheren
raid on Holland in 1809 and many soldiers on both sides
of the American Civil War. It turned back many of the
travellers who explored west Africa and brought the
building of the Panama Canal to a standstill. When,
after a thousand years, a cure was finally found,
Europe's Protestants, among them Oliver Cromwell, who
suffered badly from malaria, feared it was nothing more
than a Popish poison.More than any previous medicine,
though, quinine forced physicians to change their ideas
about treating illness. Before long, it would change the
face of Western medicine. Using fresh research from the
Vatican and the Indian Archives in Seville, as well as
hitherto undiscovered documents in Peru, Fiammetta Rocco
describes the ravages of the disease, the quest of the
three Englishmen who smuggled cinchona seeds out of
South America, the way quinine opened the door to
Western imperial adventure in Asia, Africa and beyond,
and why, even today, quinine grown in the eastern Congo
still saves so many people suffering from
malaria. |
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