Quinine's feverish tales and trails: for centuries, this alkaloid, produced from the bark of an Andean tree, provoked international disputes and intrigue as scientists pursued the cure for malaria.

• Author: Werner, Louis

Next time you catch inexplicable chill on a hot day in the jungle and an old country doctor prescribes "powders of the countess" ground from "Jesuit's bark" peeled off a "fever tree," you probably have a touch of malaria, and what you will be taking is quinine, which for centuries in one form or another has been the best treatment.

Quinine is the strongest of four fever-fighting alkaloids found in the bark of trees of the genus Cinchona, belonging to the Rubiaceae family, of which there are some twenty-three species, all native to South America, growing along the eastern spine of the Andes. While quinine was not isolated in pharmacological form until 1820, cinchona bark had been known by Europeans since the early seventeenth century as a cure for malaria in all its various forms, known then by such archaic names as the ague, tertiana, quartana, and double quartana fevers.

It is a peculiarity of how scientific knowledge often moves Onward--in periodic lags and spurts, in alternating breakthroughs and dead ends--that, for more than one hundred years, cinchona was the well-known bark of an unknown tree that, for more than two hundred years, cured the well-known symptoms of an unknown disease.

Before the discovery of cinchona bark, malaria had no known relief, even though the disease had ravaged the western world for millennia. The ancient Greek physician Dioscorides had first classified malarial fevers as tertian and quartan, that is, recurring cyclically every first and third day or every first and fourth day. His recommended remedy, ingesting either the three-leaf or four-leaf cinquefoil plant, was no more effective than the other leading prescriptions of the day--eating spider webs, wearing amulets containing dogs' teeth, or sleeping with Book 4 of the Iliad under one's pillow.

How and when cinchona was first found to relieve malarial fever is unknown, especially given that it is uncertain if people of the pre-1492 Americas suffered from the disease at all, or whether it was an unwanted gift of the Columbian exchange. That the tree should be called cinchona is due to the legend of its first successfully treated European patient, herself an unwilling participant in this exchange. A subsequent typographical error, made by the Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus when classifying the cinchona tree on the basis of its flower's sexual characteristics, is responsible for its spelling

The countess of Chinchon, wife of the viceroy of Peru and an unhappy resident of the Americas during her husband's ten-year duty there, was said to have taken ill with a debilitating fever in 1635. Word reached the viceregal palace from the northern town of Loja, located in the audiencia of Quito, that the bark of a tree there, called cava-chucchu, or fever bark, when pulverized and eaten, was known to cure such an ill. So the story was told--the bark was sent for and it cured the virreina, whereby the medicine became known under the colloquial name polvos de la condesa.

Despite many repetitions of this story through the years, it is probably untrue. The viceroy's personal secretary kept a detailed record of all his mistress's aches and pains while abroad, and in that time all that he noted amiss was one sore throat and one case of mild diarrhea. She did die, however, in Cartagena of undetermined cause, enroute home to Madrid in 1641.

If the countess had known the chronicle of the Augustinian order in Peru, written in Lima by the friar Antonio de la Calancha sometime before her purported malarial bout, she would have read this: "A tree grows which they call the fever tree (arbol de calenturas), in the country of Loja, whose bark, of the color of cinnamon, made into a powder amounting to the...