kina

Quinine takes its name from French quinine (coined 1820), from Spanish quina or quina-quina — the Spanish rendering of Quechua kina or kina-kina, meaning 'bark' or 'bark of barks.' The reduplication kina-kina is a Quechua intensification meaning something like 'the bark above all barks,' or 'the quintessential bark' — a construction that names the cinchona tree by its most remarkable property. The word quinine is thus a chemical suffix appended to a Quechua description: the substance named for the property of the source plant. French chemists Pierre Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Bienaimé Caventou isolated the alkaloid from cinchona bark in 1820 and named their compound by adding the French suffix -ine to quina; the naming was straightforward but the journey from Andean bark to French laboratory had taken nearly three centuries.

The Quechua-speaking peoples of the Andes — primarily in present-day Peru and Ecuador — had long used the ground bark of the cinchona tree (genus Cinchona, family Rubiaceae) as a treatment for shivering, mixed with sweetened water to offset its extreme bitterness. Whether they specifically used it to treat the fever cycles of malaria is debated: some historians argue that malaria was not present in the Americas before European contact, meaning the Quechua were treating shivering from cold or altitude effects rather than malarial fever. Others argue that forms of malaria existed in the Americas pre-contact. What is certain is that the bark's bitter compounds — cinchona alkaloids including quinine — are genuinely effective against the Plasmodium parasites that cause malaria, and that Andean people knew the bark stopped certain cycles of fever and shivering before European medicine asked why.

The story of how cinchona bark reached Europe is wrapped in competing legends. The most famous, probably apocryphal, holds that Ana de Osorio, Countess of Chinchón and wife of the Spanish Viceroy of Peru, was cured of malaria by the bark in 1638 and brought it back to Spain, which is why the botanist Linnaeus named the genus Cinchona in her honor in 1742. The historical record does not support this account cleanly — the Countess's diary shows no such illness — but the story spread widely and shaped the European reception of the drug. What is confirmed is that Jesuit missionaries were carrying cinchona bark to Europe by the 1640s, using it to treat malaria, and the treatment became known as 'Jesuit's bark' or 'Peruvian bark.' The Catholic church's association with the cure made Protestant nations suspicious of it for decades — Oliver Cromwell reportedly refused cinchona bark and died of malaria in 1658.

Quinine's medical and political significance across the nineteenth century was immense. The isolation of pure quinine in 1820 allowed standardized dosing, making the treatment reliable for the first time. The British army's use of quinine in India drove the invention of tonic water — quinine dissolved in carbonated water — as a palatable delivery vehicle, mixed with gin to make the bitterness tolerable. That gin-and-tonic became the social drink of the British Empire was partly a consequence of the Quechua bark. The Dutch cultivation of cinchona trees in Java, beginning in 1854, eventually produced the world's quinine supply and gave the Netherlands a pharmaceutical monopoly that would have dramatic strategic consequences in the Second World War when Japan's capture of Java cut Allied access to quinine. The bark of a Peruvian tree, named in its Quechua description, had become a determinant of military capacity across the planet.