If you have ever had a gin and tonic or just plain tonic water, then you are already familiar with what cinchona bark tastes like. The bitter flavour of tonic water is due to added quinine, an alkaloid from the bark of various species of cinchona tree native to forests of the Andes and the Amazon basin in South America. We owe the tasty combination of tonic water and quinine to the British Empire. As it turns out, quinine is a prophylactic against malaria. In the 19th century, quinine-enriched tonic water was used to safeguard the health of the soldiers and colonists who were the vanguard of the British Empire in malaria-prone regions around the globe. But well before quinine became an instrument of imperialism in the 1800s, cinchona bark was one of the world’s most important medicaments and medical commodities. How did the world come to know this South American wonder drug?

The answer to this question points to the critical importance of the early modern Andean world in the global history of knowledge. We do not know exactly when the medicinal properties of cinchona bark were first discovered, but we can make some good guesses about who discovered them. According to the most recent research by historians and anthropologists, it seems likely native healers (known as hanpiq in Quechua, quilliri in Aymara and curanderos in Spanish) in the Andean regions of precolonial South America were the first to use the bark medicinally. Pre-Colombian artefacts, colonial texts and recent studies of Andean ethnomedicine provide ample evidence that the native cultures of the area harbour a deep and dynamic history of medical theory and practice. European colonists benefitted from this medical knowledge in the early years of Spanish colonisation in the Andes. In 1571, a description of cinchona bark and its uses among Indians in the region of Guayaquil appeared in one of the first accounts of medicinal substances from America published in Europe. Its author was Nicolás Monardes (1493–1558), a physician based in Seville, Spain’s primary port city on the Atlantic and an ideal location for collecting information from merchants, missionaries and other travellers returning from the Americas. This and all other early accounts identify the peoples of the Andes as the providers of information about the bark. As a result, Peru, as the region became known in Europe, gained a reputation in the early modern world not only as the primary source of the bark but also as the source of knowledge about the bark. Indeed, in many regions of Western and Southern Europe the bark became known simply as cortex peruvianus or Peruvian bark.

By the end of the 17th century, cinchona bark had become one of the most important and valuable medical commodities in the Atlantic world. Its success was due in part to its reputation as a medicament. Healers throughout the region soon developed a variety of applications for the bark. At the same time, its success as a medical commodity was also due to the fact that it travelled well. Its medical virtues remained intact even after the long journey across land and sea from Andean forests to European pharmacies.

What most existing accounts of the history of cinchona bark often overlook is how much knowledge and skill it took to produce cinchona bark of sufficient quality for medical use and sufficient stability to travel long distances. Fortunately, communities of healers in the Andes – especially those in the regions of what is today southern Ecuador and northern Peru – had been cultivating this knowledge and expertise for generations. The first step in the process was finding the trees. In the dense and verdant forests of the northern Andes, this was no easy task. And after the bark became a major medical commodity in the late 17th century, the task became more difficult and time consuming with each passing year. Since cinchona trees were not cultivated in South America, cascarilleros – as bark collectors were known in the Spanish language – had to travel deeper and deeper into the forests in search of cinchona trees to supply the growing demand for bark. Once a stand of trees was located, a bark collector had to be able to identify which of the trees had the best bark for harvesting, based on various factors including the age of the tree and its local environment. Then, the bark was carefully stripped, with attention so that the resulting strip be neither too thin nor too thick. The next step was to dry the pieces of bark by laying them out under covered wooden structures specially constructed for that purpose. Drying the bark was considered a particularly important step for locking in its medical virtues. Finally, the bark collectors carefully packed the strips into wooden crates or leather pouches known in Spanish as zurrónes for their long voyage to Europe.

The knowledge and skill of Andean cascarilleros and curanderos has gone largely unrecognised because these groups left few written sources and European observers were often dismissive of indigenous knowledge. According to studies by Peruvian anthropologist Lupe Camino, the region of what is today northern Peru and southern Ecuador, where European colonists first learned about cinchona bark, was one of intense activity among Andean healers for centuries before Spanish colonisation and indeed remains so today. Many of the earliest European accounts of the bark report that native peoples in this region taught European colonists, missionaries and soldiers about cinchona and its uses. Nicolás Monardes reported in his late 16th-century book on American medicaments that the Spanish learned to use the bark medicinally ‘on the advice of the Indians’.¹ A few decades later, in 1639, Gaspar Caldera de Heredia echoed Monardes with his account of how Spanish colonists in Quito ‘were taught by the Indians of that region’ to use cinchona bark medicinally and how Jesuit missionaries learned about the bark by observing the ways local Indians used it.²

Records of trade from cities such as London and Seville show that by the late 17th century cinchona bark had become the most prominent medical drug imported to Europe from the Americas. As the reputation of cinchona spread and its prevalence in apothecary shops increased, the bark became an object of study. For example, in Genoa in the 1630s, physician Sebastian Bado conducted therapeutic tests with it, and in the late 17th century, it was one of the first items that Dutch naturalist and physician Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) studied under his microscope. These studies would not have been possible without the skill and expertise of Andean cascarilleros and curanderos, who continued to produce medically efficacious bark for use by European physicians and pharmacists and their patients.

In the 18th century, European monarchies – notably those of France and Spain – supported several scientific expeditions to South America with further study of the cinchona tree and its bark an explicit goal. Unsurprisingly, the expeditions relied heavily on Andean knowledge of cinchona. In 1737, Charles Marie de La Condamine (1701–74) led a Franco-Hispanic expedition to the Audiencia of Quito to take measurements of the shape of the Earth at the equator. La Condamine visited Loja, the most famous cinchona bark producing region in South America, to learn more about the tree. During his visit, he depended on the expertise of Fernando de la Vega, a bark collector and curandero in Loja. Vega led La Condamine on excursions to observe cinchona trees in their natural habitat, and he collected bark samples for the Frenchman. In the late 18th century, cinchona merchants and bark collectors in Lima and other regions of the Viceroyalty of Peru provided their expert knowledge and assistance to the Royal Botanical Expedition to Peru and Chile (1777–88), led by the Spanish naturalists Hipólito Ruiz (1754–1816) and José Pavón (1754–1840). In the Viceroyalty of New Granada, José Celestino Mutis (1732–1808), director of the Royal Botanical Expedition based in Bogotá, learned from local experts such as Miguel de Santisteban, an official at the royal mint in Bogotá who had travelled to Loja, as well as Sebastian López Ruiz, a physician from Panama. Indeed, in a transcription of a report found among the extant papers of José Celestino Mutis at the archive of the Royal Botanical Garden in Madrid, Fernando de la Vega recounts the various ways in which he manipulated the bark to produce extracts and tinctures for therapeutic use. Similarly, when Mutis was looking to confirm the botanical identity of what appeared to be a new variety of cinchona tree growing in the forests outside of Bogotá, Pedro de Valdivieso, an official from Loja and a member of a merchant family prominent in the cinchona trade, offered to perform the necessary analysis and ‘experiments’ to make the determination. Without the benefit of the knowledge of these local experts, scientific travellers from Europe would have been at a loss to gather, understand and classify specimens.

Andean knowledge of cinchona bark was also vital to efforts that led to the identification of quinine, the plant alkaloid that gives cinchona bark its effectiveness in treating malaria. European efforts to identify the active principle of cinchona bark intensified in the 18th century, in part in response to the increase in trade in the bark and in part as a consequence of increasing sophistication in the chemical analysis of plants. In the 1790s, French chemist Antoine François de Fourcroy (1755–1809) conducted a systematic chemical analysis of cinchona bark, isolating a red, resinous substance that had some alkaline chemical properties. Ultimately, his efforts proved ineffective in the treatment of malaria. In 1811, Bernardino António Gomes, a surgeon in the Portuguese navy, isolated a crystalline substance that he called cinchonine. However, he did not recognise the alkaline nature of the material. Then, in 1820, two French pharmacists, Pierre Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Bienaimé Caventou, determined that the substance isolated by Gomes was a mixture of two alkaloids, one of which they called cinchonine and the other quinine. While the success of the decades-long effort to isolate and identify quinine represented a significant technical and scientific achievement on the part of European chemists and pharmacists, it is important to recognise that most if not all of the samples of cinchona bark that they used as starting material were selected and prepared in the Andes. In other words, the technical achievement of isolating quinine in Europe was built on the prior technical achievement of knowing how to transform tree bark into an effective medicament. In this way, the knowledge of Andean cascarilleros and curanderos played a foundational role in the development of one of the most important medicaments in the modern history of medicine.

Even with the isolation and identification of quinine, cinchona bark remained an important medicament well into the 19th century. In their efforts to dampen the impact of malaria in colonial India, agents of the British Empire spearheaded a mission to transplant cinchona trees from South America to India. These endeavours were largely successful, and cinchona bark was as a result reinvented as a trademark instrument of the British Empire. In the late 1800s, the Dutch successfully transplanted cinchona trees to Indonesia. Using the chemical and botanical sciences to develop varieties of cinchona tree with high concentrations of quinine, the Dutch eventually secured a de facto monopoly on the global production of quinine.

Because tree bark is an object that can be collected directly from nature, it may not seem, at first glance, that cinchona bark is an artifact of knowledge. But as this brief account has noted, the strips of cinchona that circulated and alleviated the suffering of countless people in the early modern world were not just random pieces of tree bark. They simultaneously embodied the individual knowledge of the particular person who harvested them from Andean forests and the collective knowledge of Andean medicine and culture. The ability of the scientific agents of European empires to produce new knowledge was thus made possible by the deep and dynamic history of knowledge-making in the Andes.

FURTHER READING

Boumediene, S. (2016) La colonisation du savior: une histoire des plantes médicinales du ‘Nouveau Monde’ (Vaulx-en-Velin: Éditions des Mondes à faire).

Camino, L. (1992) Cerros, plantas, y lagunas ponderosas: la medicina al norte del Perú (Piura: CIPCA).

Crawford, M.J. (2016) The Andean Wonder Drug: Cinchona Bark and Imperial Science in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630–1820 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press).

Headrick, D. (1981) Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York, NY: Oxford University Press).

Kaufman, T.S., and E.A. Rúveada (2004) ‘The quest for quinine: those who won the battles and those who won the war’, Angewandte Chemie, vol. 25, 854–85.

Philip, K. (1995) ‘Imperial science rescues a tree: global botanic networks, local knowledge and the transcontinental transplantation of cinchona’, Environment and History, 1: 173–200.

Wallis, P. (2011) ‘Exotic drugs and English medicine: England’s drug trade, c.1550–c.1800’, Social History of Medicine, vol. 25, 25–46.

¹ N. Monardes, Segunda parte del libro de las cosas que se traen nuestras Indias Occidentales, que sirven al uso de medicina (Seville: En Casa Alonso Escriuano Impressor, 1571), 117.

² G.C. de Heredia, De pulvere febrifugo Occidentalis Indiae (1663) y la introducción de la quina en Europe, J.M.L. Piñero and F. Calero, eds. (Valencia: Instituto de Estudios Documentales e Históricos sobre la Ciencia, 1992).