"Jesuits' Bark"

The History of Quinine

From the “Catholic Missions

Magazine”

LAST year thousands of saplings of cinchona trees were transplanted from special nurseries in Maryland, USA, to Central American countries. To day, 10,000 acres in Costa Rica are devoted to their growth. Guatemala boasts that in ten years it hopes to be one of the largest and best producers of quinine in the world. Brazil, not to be outdone, sent Dr. Roberto Souza Coelho to explain to Americans the extensive transplanting experiments in Sao Paulo.

It will take 10 years for these trees to yield in sufficient quantities their priceless contribution to the welfare of mankind. Meanwhile, literally hundreds of millions will suffer and many millions die because their product is not available.

The tree is no new discovery. It was known and its product used 400 years ago. The product of the cinchona tree is quinine, the best malaria remedy known. Its native habitat was originally South America, but to-day an estimated 98% of the world’s quinine comes from Java, which is completely controlled by the Japanese, and completely lost to us.

The once-flourishing hillsides of South America have been stripped bare.

Only now, when the scourge -of malaria attacks our own soldiers in the tropical war zones, are we taking steps to bring cinchona trees back to their first home.

Meanwhile we are seriously short of the precious quinine.

Quinine will be needed after the war.

In India alone some 3,000,000 die annually among 100,000,000 malaria sufferers.

Almost every tropical country needs the drug in great abundance.

CINCHONA is bound up with the his tory of the missions. No one would have suspected that a saint who never left Europe’s shores, would have so much to do with the story of a South American medicine, yet if Francis Borgia, third General of the Society of Jesus, had not sent Father Ruiz de Portillo and his little band of eight missionaries to Peru in 1567 to help undo the harm which the conquistadors had worked among the Indians, the whole history of quinine would be quite different.

The Spanish Jesuits first learned its medicinal qualities w 7 hen one of them was cured of malaria at Loxa by use of the bark as taught them by the natives.

Cinchona grew in abundance on the western slopes of the Peruvian Andes. The Jesuits gave it its first name, “Loxa bark.”

In 1630 Countess Chinchon, the wife of the Viceroy, just arrived from Europe, fell a victim of malaria. She was saved from death by some doses of the Loxa bark in crude powdered form, prepared

by the missionaries. In gratitude, she had large quantities brought from the mountains to the Jesuit dispensary of St.

Paul’s College in Lima, to be distributed to poor victims of the fever. The Fathers called her gift “Countess powder” and the tree to this day is known as the cin chona tree. But the natives insisted on calling the powder “Jesuit bark” after their benefactors, who saved their lives with it.

In 1632, Father de Cobo, SJ, shipped it to Europe. Eleven years later, Bartolome Tafur made it widely known in Spain, but because of strong anti-Jesuit feeling among Protestants, the so-called “Jesuit bark” was frowned upon by many of the medical profession.

Cardinal de Lugo wrote a defence of the cinchona bark after a favourable report by the Papal physician, De Lugo was followed by other Jesuit scientists, notably Honore Fabri, who is credited with answering Dr. Jean Jaques Chifflet’s anti-cinchona pamphlet. By 1658, Lon don chemists sold “Jesuit’s powder” in their apothecary shops.

Attempts to grow the seeds in European soil failed. The pioneers did not know that seeds would die unless packed in sealed containers, and kept under proper conditions of humidity and temperature.

Gradually quinine was transplanted to India and Ceylon in limited quantities, but one enterprising man succeeded in growing it in Java. Before the war, 98% of the quinine came from there.

WHAT happened in South America? In the sixteenth and seventeenth cen turies, the world’s whole supply came from Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador. In

the eighteenth century, with increasing demands, the hills were laid bare, and there was no reforestation. The Jesuits fought the destruction, and urged the American exploiters to lay out new plan tations. Their voices were lost in the mad scramble for the best cinchona bark at the least cost. Eventually no more was to be had.

Fortunately, some saplings had been transplanted elsewhere. World-wide mis sions conducted by Spaniards made quin ine known the world over. But the American supply was gone.

The American armies and the Filipino forces who saw the fall of Bataan learned this the hard way. When American Army doctors heard the nurses answer their request for more quinine with the words: “Sorry, we’re running low on quinine,” the long overdue process of reclaiming

quinine for America began.

But for the present, desperate measures were needed. Then Fathers Ewing and Doino, American Jesuits, one a scientist and the other a missionary, together with the chemistry laboratories of the college at Cagayan in Mindanao, were pressed into service to extract what they could from the relatively poor cinchona bark of the Philippines. It was inferior to the Javanese product, but it did help to stem the ravages of malaria in an hour of desperate need.

And now at last, cinchona and quinine are being brought back to South America mainly through the good, even if belated, efforts of the US.

It is expected that the Rev. J. W.

Dixon, of the Methodist Mission, will shortly be returning to Papua.