ABSTRACT
The discovery in the 17th century of the febrifuge qualities of cinchona bark-then known as Peruvian or Jesuits’ bark-was an important event in the history of medicine (Brown, 1698; Honigsbaum, 2001; Jarcho, 1993; see Chapter 2). The bark of the tree Cinchona officinalis L. was, as is well known, the source of quinine-the first truly effective antimalarial drug. It also paved the way for other so-called specific remedies that challenged the Galenic orthodoxy that fevers, like other diseases, should be treated by restoring the body to a healthy equilibrium. The bark came, gradually, to displace the most common methods of fever therapy like blood letting, which dominated European medicine until the middle of the 18th century. However, it also prompted a search for other specific medicines and for different varieties of febrifuge, varieties that occurred outside the domains of the Spanish-American empire. The motive for this search was partly economic, in that the trading companies of the various European powers wanted to end Spain’s profitable monopoly of the cinchona trade. But there was an important medical rationale too: the importance in the Western medical tradition of the principle of locality-the notion that diseases of particular places were best treated by medicines available nearby.
