History of Quinine

Quinine was the first effective treatment for malaria caused by Plasmodium. falciparum, appearing in therapeutics in the 17th century. It remained the antimalarial drug of choice until the 1940s. The tree is found in the rainforests along the northern end of the Andes Mountains.

Augustinian monk in Peru in 1633 wrote about powder of cinchona which can give a cure the fevers. In 1638 the Jesuits used quina bark to cure wife of the Viceroy of Peru.

The medicine, quinine, was made from bark of the cinchona tree, which grew in the mountain rainforests of Peru. Jesuit priests in Peru became familiar with curative powers of what they called ‘Peruvian bark’. There are several report that by around 1600 some Europeans had been cured of fever by Peruvian bark.

It was brought back to England in 1640. English Protestants called it powder of the devil. The introduction of quinine marks the beginning of modern pharmacology.

Englishman name Robert Talbor mid 1600s, then realized that those cinchona bark have a reaction to the malaria fever. He then started using cinchona bark to cure malaria. He treated royalty and then awarded knighthood and appointed as Royal Physician in 1679.

In 1820, Pierre-Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Bienaimé Caventou isolated an alkaloid from cinchona (or quina) bark and named it quinine. The purified compound began to be used instead of powdered bark to treat malaria.

In 1828 Friedrich Wohler synthesized urea form ammonium chloride and silver cyanate, both considered minerals and showed that organic compounds might be made from inorganic ones.

This process, along with Hermann Kolbe’s preparation of acetic acid in 1845, gave hope to some that quinine might soon be artificially-synthetically-formed.

By the late 1800s, the malaria parasite had been identified and Ronald Ross had discovered the role of the mosquito vector. Ross launched “mosquito brigades” to eradicate the vector in England, while another public health advocate, S. P. James, advocated improving housing to separate humans from mosquitoes.

In 1854, Adolph Strecker at the University of Christiana, Oslo determined quinines empirical formula.

In 1936, quinine sulfate was made by Merck and Company, New Jersey and sold in machine made, wide mouth, blue glass bottles with metal screw caps.
History of Quinine