THE MIRACULOUS FEVER-TREE
Malaria, medicine and the cure that changed the world
Fiammetta Rocco
For Dan, for the best of gifts and so much else besidesAnd for my father who, without quinine,would have died as a boy
CONTENTS
Early-Eighteenth-Century South America
Introduction: The Tree of Fevers
6 To War and to Explore – From Holland to West Africa
7 To Explore and to War – From America to Panama
9 The Science – India, England and Italy
Early-Eighteenth-Century South America
INTRODUCTION The Tree of Fevers
‘Cinchona revolutionised the art of medicine as profoundly as gunpowder had the art of war.’
BERNARDO RAMAZZINI, physician to the Duke of Modena, Opera omnia, medica et physica (1717)
Francesco Torti’s ‘Tree of Fevers’ may be nearly three hundred years old, but it swells on the page as though it rose from the ground this very spring. At the crown, its trunk branches like an earthly anemone, and its arms grow thick and dark. On the left side of the engraving, the tree bark hums with sap and leaves grow at intervals in thick bunches of green. The branches on the right, by contrast, are denuded and leafless. Tissue-white, they curl upwards as if in supplication to the Almighty.
Torti, who once saved his own life by taking a dose of powdered Peruvian quinine bark to cure an intermittent fever, as malaria was once called, believed that there were two kinds of fever: those, represented by the leafy branches on the left side of his tree, that respond to treatment with the bark; and those, like the dead willowy kind, that do not.
But Torti took his inspiration from another tree, one that he had never seen, and one that for centuries would remain an enigma. The magnificent Cinchona calisaya, the red-barked Andean tree that produces quinine, is one of ninety varieties of cinchona, a relative of the madder family, which also includes coffee and gardenias. Some cinchonas have large leaves, some small; some smooth, some roughly corrugated. But the leaves on the older trees of the true red bark – the cascarilla roja that grows eighty feet high – are fiery red. The colour offsets the lilac-like flowers that grow in delicate white clusters, and which are followed by a dry fruit that splits, at the onset of winter, to release narrow winged seeds so tiny and fine that they run to as many as 100,000 to the ounce. Joseph de Jussieu, the first European to set eyes on the cinchona, thirty years after Torti’s engraving of 1712, believed that Cinchona calisaya was the most beautiful tree he had ever seen.
For Torti and de Jussieu, intermittent fever or malaria was a disease of the Old World. No one knew for certain where it came from or what caused it. But everywhere the Old World expanded its boundaries – pushed ever on by commerce, religion and war – malaria followed. And the price it exacted was beyond imagining. ‘Malarial fever,’ wrote Sir Ronald Ross, the Englishman who in 1902 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for proving that malaria is transmitted