Cinchona Bark as a Remedy for Malaria

In Spanish Peru the bitter bark of the cinchona tree was called cascarilla. How its power against fever came to light is unclear. The Jesuit Sánchez Labrador recorded a story from Loja of a man who recovered from a fever after drinking from a lake made bitter by fallen cinchona trees. Historians still debate whether Indigenous healers knew the bark cured malaria or whether Jesuits worked that out after learning its use against fever from them.

The James Lind Library dates the first documented Spanish use to around 1630. A 2026 review of early Peruvian sources in CDC's Emerging Infectious Diseases cites an account in which Pedro Leiva, a chief of the Palta people, treated a Jesuit sick with malaria, who then used the bark to cure a Spanish official, the corregidor Cañizares, in 1630. The better-known story, that the Countess of Chinchón, wife of the Viceroy of Peru, was cured of a fever in 1630 and gave the tree its name, is a legend. The CDC review notes that most researchers now consider it apocryphal, and Cambridge University Library reports that research has almost entirely rejected it.

Jesuits brought the bark to Europe, where it was known as Jesuits' powder, Peruvian bark or cardinal's powder. Exports to Spain began around 1640 and reached Rome and Paris about ten years later, and Jesuit colleges in Genoa, Lyon, Louvain and Ratisbon were using it from 1650. A Roman recipe of about that date, the Schedula Romana, usually credited to Cardinal Juan de Lugo, had two drachms of finely ground bark steeped in strong wine and taken daily.

Quality was a problem from the start. Barks of uneven strength and outright fakes, some from holly, flooded the market, and European botanists did not describe the tree until about 1730. Protestants distrusted a remedy promoted by Jesuits. In England Robert Talbor published an account of a secret cure for ague in 1672 and became physician to Charles II and later Louis XIV. Thomas Sydenham, lukewarm about the bark in 1666, called it the only specific ten years later.

Pierre-Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Bienaimé Caventou isolated two alkaloids from the bark in 1820, quinine and cinchonine. Quinine's molecular structure was not worked out until 1944, and only then could antimalarial drugs be synthesized on a commercial scale.