Isolation of quinine from cinchona bark

Jesuit missionaries in South America were using the bark of the cinchona tree against fever by about 1630, and within decades it was known in Europe as Jesuits' bark. The bark was dried, ground to a powder and drunk, usually in wine. In England Robert Talbor sold a secret fever cure; revealed after his death, it was Jesuits' powder in wine.

For some 80 years after Linnaeus named the tree in 1742, chemists tried and failed to isolate the substance in the bark that did the work. In 1819 Friedrich Ferdinand Runge obtained what he called China base. A year later Pelletier and Caventou treated the bark of Cinchona cordifolia with acid, neutralized the extract with alkali, and obtained the same substance. They named it quinine.

Samples went to clinicians in Paris hospitals, and several soon reported that quinine worked against malaria. Production grew fast. By 1826 Pelletier and Caventou were making more than 3,500 kg of quinine sulfate a year, which took over 150,000 kg of bark. A glass bottle of their original 1820 preparation, collected for Henry Wellcome's museum in 1934, is now in the Science Museum Group collection.

Demand for bark soared. In 1880 Colombia alone exported six million pounds of it to Europe. The exporting countries, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, banned the export of cinchona seeds to protect their trade. The bark held other alkaloids too, and in a trial from 1866 to 1868 in 3,600 patients, quinine, quinidine, cinchonine and cinchonidine all stopped the fevers in more than 98 percent of cases. After 1890 quinine became the one most used, because bark from Java contained more of it. Dutch plantations there came to dominate the market, and quinine remained the mainstay of malaria treatment until the 1920s.