cinchona bark

Cinchona bark was once worth as much as silver, gram for gram, and it gives us quinine. The Quechua Indians living in the Peruvian Andes knew that drinking hot tea of the powdered bark helped to treat fever, and around 1630, Jesuit missionaries shipped it back to Europe where it was hailed as a miracle cure for malaria. Malaria treatment with quinine marked the first successful use of a chemical compound to treat an infectious disease, and it remained the mainstay of treatment until the introduction of anti-malarials in the 1920s.

We have a number of copies of the Medico-Chirurgical Review in our book store, dating to the early 1820s, and we have used these, along with Alan Mann’s teaching box to tell you a little more about cinchona bark:

ALAN MANN’S TEACHING BOX

Alan Mann was former Chief Pharmacist at Worcester Royal Infirmary. This box contains the raw materials needed to prepare remedies such as ointments and tinctures. Of the 150 different samples, 80% come from plants. Mann used this box in practice while treating patients, at home, and also as a teaching resource when lecturing in Pharmacology at the Worcester School of Nursing. In style it is very reminiscent of a homeopathic ‘remedy kit’, but we don’t know Mann’s views on homeopathy.

In this ‘kit’, there are two cinchona barks: red (rubrae) and yellow (flavae), which are No.s 36 and 37, respectively.

The Medico-Chirurgical Review (1824) tells us that:

“[They have] discovered an alkaline substance in bark, which they denominated cinchonine. This they obtained by operating on the grey cinchona. The yellow bark (cordifolia) furnished an alkali which differed considerably from the cinchonine, and to which they gave the name of quinine. Next followed the analysis of red bark (c.oblongifolia) which furnished cinchonine in triple the quantity furnished by the yellow bark. Further experiments, on a large scale, have shewn that quinine and cinchonine exist simultaneously; but the cinchonine is, relatively to the quinine, in greater quantity in the grey bark; whilst, in the yellow bark, the quinine so predominates, that the presence of cinchonine might readily escape notice.”

According to the Medico-Chirurgical Review (1824), a wine or tincture of the sulphate of quinine may be made thus:-

• Sulphate of quinine, 10 grains; Madeira wine, two pints.

• The tincture-sulphate of quinine, five grains; alcohol, one ounce.

However, we should also note the dangers: