The global history of quinine, the world’s first anti-malaria drug
Up until the 1940s quinine was the go-to way to treat malaria infections. Its history is one tightly entangled with the history of European empires, and their quests for domination in the malaria-ridden areas of the world. Just like the empires quinine supported the history of this drug, and the plant it derives from, stretches the globe: from the Andean jungles of South-America to the global network of British botanical gardens, from the colonial plantations of Southern-India to the Indonesian island of Java.
Quinine is extracted from the Cinchona tree that is native to the Andean regions of South America. While there is some doubt about whether malaria was already present in the Americas before European colonization, academic consensus suggests that it was not. The disease seems to have been introduced by seafaring Europeans, after the so-called Colombian Exchange….
https://medium.com/@tcassauwers/the-global-history-of-the-world-s-first-anti-malaria-drug-d1e11f0ba729