This is a picture of the Cinchona Tree in South America.
...History...
Quinine, being found naturally in the bark of a cinchona tree, was discovered hundreds of years ago by Peruvian Jesuits in South America. The tree is found in the rainforests along the northern end of the Andes Mountains. Legends claim that its name, “cinchona” comes from an ancient Countess of Cinchon, whose husband cured her using the bark of this tree. It makes sense, because the natives there used it to bring down fevers, hence its name, “The Fever Tree.” Explorers came to that area in the 1600s, bringing malaria with them, and learned about this secret white powder from the natives, who called it “quinquina”, or “bark of barks.”
This is a picture of the Cinchona Tree in
South America.
In
1640, the Catholic Jesuits brought this chemical cure back to Europe, but it
wasn’t popular at all among the English Protestants, whose leader called it
“powder of the devil.” It also was reviled by the doctors in Europe, who
still strongly believed in the bleeding of their patients (It was, of course,
the 17th century).
However, in 1679, an English apothecary who secretly used the “Jesuit
Powder” cured both King Charles II of England and the son of King Louis XIV of
France of a malaria fever. After the cure became public, it was both extremely
popular and extremely expensive. The rich were the only ones who could afford
it, since it cost [the equivalent to] $150 a week!
Of course, with this cure for a deadly disease discovered, the bark was seriously in demand (quinine itself wasn’t isolated from the bark until 1820). Over 25,000 Cinchona trees were destroyed every year by 1795, making it borderline extinct. Peruvian officers prohibited exportation of the tree because it was so valuable. However, domestication was the only answer, and in 1865, the Dutch government bought a pound of smuggled seeds and planted 12,000 trees in Java for only $20. Because of this, they monopolized the industry for almost 100 years.
In 1820, two French scientists named J.B. Caventou and P.J. Pelletier isolated the chemical that seemed to cure malaria from the bark. They then named it quinine and a monument in Paris has been erected for them. To find more detailed information on this process, go to Structure and Other Chemical Properties.
World War II was also a big time for quinine because of all the deaths from malaria on the battlefield. Over 60.000 US troops died from the deadly mosquito bite; the numbers being so high because the allied troops did not have control of the world's supply of quinine. In 1942, at the beginning of the war, most of the cultivated trees in Java and Indonesia were taken by Japan. At the same time, the Germans took all the trees that had been planted in Amsterdam. The US was forced to smuggle out roughly 4,000,000 cinchona seeds from the Philippines. They were then germinated in the US and taken to Costa Rica to be harvested. This was all too late to help the war- the soldiers were already dead.
During and after WWII (because of the deaths of all the American soldiers), two scientists named Robert Woodward and William Doering began experimenting on synthesizing quinine out of other materials. By 1944 (the same time as experiments were being performed for improvements in chemical military weapons), they discovered a way to do this by using coal tar. This discovery (and others like it at the same time) was the beginning of organic chemistry.