The Miraculous Fever-Tree

by Fiammetta Rocco

  On the exploration of Africa, Hugh l’Etang, ‘Mungo Park’, The Practitioner 1971, 207: 562–6; Michael Gelfand, Rivers of Death in Africa: An Inaugural Lecture 10 October 1963, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1964; Robert M. Goldwyn, ‘Medical Explorers in Africa’, Journal of the American Medical Association 7 April 1969, 208: 135–8; Marjorie Meehan, ‘Physician Travelers’, Journal of the American Medical Association 3 April 1972, 220: 97–102; W.E. Swinton, ‘Physicians as Explorers: Mungo Park, the Doctor on the Niger’, Canadian Medical Association Journal 17 September 1977, 117: 695–7, and ‘Physicians as Explorers: David Livingstone, 30 Years of Service in Darkest Africa’, Canadian Medical Association Journal 17 December 1977, 117: 1435–40.

  The first serious compilation of statistics concerning the illness and death of soldiers serving in the British Army was Statistical Reports on the Sickness, Mortality and Invaliding Among the Troops in Western Africa, St. Helena, the Cape of Good Hope and Mauritius, 1840.

  William Balfour Baikie’s West African journey is recounted in A Narrative of an Exploring Voyage up the Rivers Kwo’ra and Bi’nue (commonly known as the Niger and the Tsadda), London, 1856. His unpublished manuscript, On the Remittant Fever of Western Africa, 1856, is in the British Library, Add. Ms 32, 448.

  Chapter 7: To Explore and to War – From America to Panama

  On malaria in the United States, E.H. Ackernecht, ‘Malaria in the Upper Mississippi Valley 1760–1900’, Supplement to the Bulletin of History of Medicine 1945, 4; M.A. Barber, ‘The History of Malaria in the United States’, Public Health Reports 1929, 44: 2575–87; Elisha Bartlett, The History, Diagnosis and Treatment of Fevers of the United States, Philadelphia, 1847; A.W. Bennett, ‘Malaria Endemic in Iowa’, Journal of the Iowa State Medical Society 1943; J.R. St. Childs, Malaria and Colonization in the Carolina Low Country 1526–1696, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1940; Daniel Drake, Malaria in the Interior Valley of North America, 1850, reissued by University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1964; E.C. Faust, ‘The History of Malaria in the United States’, American Scientist 1951, 39: 121–30; L.W. Hackett, ‘The Disappearance of Malaria in Europe and the United States’, Rivista di Parassitologia 1952, 13:43–56; Margaret Humphreys, Malaria: Poverty, Race and Public Health in the United States, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 2001.

  On the use of quinine during the American Civil War, J.W. Churchman, ‘The Use of Quinine During the Civil War’, Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin 1906, 17: 175–81; and Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion (1861–65), Part I by Joseph K. Barnes, 1870; Part II by Joseph Janvier Woodward, 1879; Part III by Charles Smart, 1888.

  On the manufacture of quinine in America, J.W. England, ‘The American Manufacture of Quinine Sulphate’, Philadelphia College of Pharmacy 1898, 1: 57–64.

  The most important sources on John Sappington are Sappington’s own writings, The Theory and Treatment of Fevers, 1884, reprinted in 1971. See also Walter Morrow Burks, Missouri Medicine Man, M.A. thesis, University of Kansas City, 1958; Thomas Findley, ‘Sappington’s Anti-Fever Pills and the Westward Migration’, Transactions of the American Clinical and Climatological Association 1967, 79: 34–44; Thomas B. Hall, ‘John Sappington M.D. (1776–1856)’, Missouri Historical Review 1930, 177–99; Lynn Morrow, John Sappington: Southern Patriarch in the New West, Columbia, Missouri, 1985; E.G. Riley, John Sappington, Doctor and Philanthropist, MA thesis, University of Columbia-Missouri, 1942; W.A. Strickland Jr., ‘Quinine Pills: Manufactured on the Missouri Frontier’, Pharmacy in History 1983, 25: 61–8.

  For the medical history of the Panama Canal, see W.P. Chamberlain, Twenty-Five Years of American Medical Activity on the Isthmus of Panama 1904–1929, Panama Canal Press, 1929; J.F. Stevens, ‘A Momentous Hour at Panama’, Science 1930, 71: 550–2. The papers of Philippe Bunau-Varilla, George Goethals, William Gorgas and John Stevens are all in the Library of Congress, Washington D.C. The records of the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocéanique are in the National Archives of the United States, as are those of the Compagnie Nouvelle du Canal de Panama.

  Chapter 8: The Seed – South America

  The richest sources of information regarding the three most important plant hunters in South America are their own writings.

  Charles Ledger’s correspondence with John Eliot Howard is in the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain along with the only known photograph of his Bolivian guide, Manuel Incra Mamani. See also Gabriele Gramiccia, The Life of Charles Ledger (1818–1905): Alpacas and Quinine, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1986; John Eliot Howard, ‘Origin of the Calisaya Ledgeriana of Commerce’, Pharmaceutical Journal 1880, 10: 730–2.

  Sir Clements Markham’s private journals and his Cinchona Notebooks (I and II) are in the Royal Geographical Society, London. He also published three works on his travels in South America, Travels in Peru and India while Superintending the Collection of Chinchona Plants and Seeds in South America and their Introduction into India, John Murray, London, 1862; A Memoir of the Lady Ana de Osorio, Countess of Chinchon, Trübner, London, 1874; and Peruvian Bark: A Popular Account of the Introduction of Chinchona Cultivation into British India 1860–1880, John Murray, London, 1880.

  Richard Spruce’s letters and journals are at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. His published writings include Report (to the Secretary of State for India) on the Expedition to Procure Seeds and Plants of the Cinchona Succirubra, or Red Bark Tree, 3 January 1862; and Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon and the Andes (edited by Alfred Russell Wallace), Macmillan, London, 1908, which begins with a long biographical section. See also M.R.D. Seaward and S.M.D. Fitzgerald (eds), Richard Spruce (1817–1893): Botanist and Explorer, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 1986.

  For the accounts of other travellers who went in search of the cinchona tree, see Alexander von Humboldt (translated by Aylmer Bourke Lambert), An Account of the Cinchona Forests of South America Drawn up During Five Years Residence and Travels on the South American Continent, Longman, London, 1821; Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America During the Years 1799–1804, Henry G. Bohm, London, 1852 and 1853; and Hugh Algernon Weddell, Histoire naturelle des quinquinas, Masson, Paris, 1849.

  Chapter 9: The Science: India, England and Italy

  On the chemistry of synthesising quinine, P. Pelletier and J. Caventou, ‘Recherches chimiques sur les quinquinas’, Annales de Chimie et de Physique, Paris, 1820, 15: 289–318 and 337–65.

  On the hunt for explaining malarial infection, Amico Bignami, ‘The inoculation theory of malarial infection’, Lancet 3 December 1898, 1461–3 and 1541–4; Eli Chernin, ‘Sir Patrick Manson: Physician to the Colonial Office 1897–1912’, Medical History 1992, 36: 320–31; J. Franchini, ‘Charles Alphonse Laveran’, Annals of the Association of Medical History 1931, 3: 280–8; Camillo Golgi, ‘Sul ciclo evolutivo dei parassiti malarici nella febbre terzana’, Scienze mediche 1889, xiii 7: 173–96; Charles Alphonse Laveran, ‘The Pathology of Malaria’, Lancet 1881, 2: 840–1; W.G. MacCallum, ‘On the Haematozoan Infections of Birds’, Journal of Experimental Medicine 1898, 3: 117–36; Dale C. Smith and Lorraine B. Sanford, ‘Laveran’s Germ: The Reception and Use of a Medical Discovery’, American Journal of Tropical Hygiene 1985, 34: 2–20.

  The correspondence between Sir Patrick Manson and Ronald Ross is in the library of the Wellcome Trust, London. A complete edition of the letters, edited by W.F. Bynum and Caroline Overy, was published under the title The Beast in the Mosquito, by Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam, in 1998. See also Patrick Manson, ‘On the Nature and Significance of the Crescentic and Flagellated Bodies in Malarial Blood’, British Medical Journal 8 December 1894, 1306–8; ‘Surgeon Major Ronald Ross’s Recent Investigations on the Mosquito-Malaria Theory’, British Medical Journal 18 June 1898, 1575–7; ‘The Mosquito and the Malaria Parasite’, British Medical Journal 24 September 1898, 849–53; and Ronald Ross, ‘On Some Peculiar Pigmented Cells Found in Two Mosquitoes Fed on
Malarial Blood’, British Medical Journal 18 December 1897, 1786–8; and ‘Researches on Malaria: Nobel Medical Prize Lecture for the Year 1902’, Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps, April-June 1905, 88ff.

  On the symptoms of malaria, S.T. Darling, ‘The Spleen Index in Malaria’, Southern Medical Journal 1924, 17: 590–5; H. Most, ‘Falciparium Malaria: The Importance of Early Diagnosis and Adequate Treatment’, Journal of the American Medical Association 1944, 124: 73–4.

  Chapter 10: The Last Forest—Congo

  Rubén Vargas Ugarte was very quick to mark the three hundredth anniversary of the discovery of quinine, with his article, ‘Una fecha olvidada: El tercer centenario de descubrimento de la quina 1631–1931’, which was published in Revista historica, Lima, in 1928, three years before the anniversary itself. For the festivities of 1931 see L. Suppan (ed.), Celebration of the Three Hundredth Anniversary of the First Recognized Use of Cinchona, Missouri Botanical Garden, St Louis, 1931.

  On the establishment of the Dutch quinine plantations, see Norman Taylor, Cinchona in Java: The Story of Quinine, Greenberg, New York, 1945.

  On malaria in the First World War, Sir S. Rickard Christophers, ‘Malaria in War’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 1939, 33: 277–304.

  On malaria in the Second World War, Office of the Surgeon-General, US Army Medical Department, Preventive Medicine in World War II: Volume 6, Communicable Diseases, Malaria, Washington D.C., 1963. See also Mary Ellen Condon-Rall, ‘Allied Cooperation in Malaria Prevention and Control: The World War II Southwest Pacific Experience’, Journal of the History of Medicine 1991, 46: 493–513; A.F. Fischer, ‘Cinchona in the Philippines’, personal communication to Paul Russell, 1952; E. Haggerty, Guerrilla Padre in Mindanao, Longmans Green & Co., New York, 1946; Mark Harrison, ‘Medicine and the Culture of Command: The Case of Malaria Control in the British Army During the Two World Wars’, Medical History 1996, 40: 437–52; Robert J.T. Joy, ‘Malaria in American Troops in the South and Southwest Pacific in World War II’, Medical History 1999, 43: 192–207; J.S. Simmons ‘The Army’s Fight Against Malaria’, Journal of the American Medical Association 1942, 120: 30ff; W.C. Steere, ‘The Botanical Work of the Cinchona Missions in South America’, Science 1945, 101:177–8.

  For the account of the Japanese submarine, I-52, see the records of the USS Bogue and the account by Paul R. Tidwell, a maritime researcher, who found the wreck of the I-52 in 1994.

  For the history of how quinine came to be grown in Congo, see Ernst Peter Fischer, Selling Science: The History of Boehringer Mannheim, 1992.

  FURTHER READING

  Cinchona and Quinine

  Maria Luisa Duran-Reynals, The Fever Bark Tree: The Pageant of Quinine, Doubleday, New York, 1946

  Anton Hogstad Jr et al, Proceedings of the Celebration of the Three Hundredth Anniversary of the First Recognised Use of Cinchona, Missouri Botanical Garden, St Louis, Missouri, 1931

  Saul Jarcho, Quinine’s Predecessor: Francesco Torti and the Early History of Cinchona, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1993

  David Reynolds, Steam and Quinine on Africa’s Great Lakes, Bygone Ships, Trains & Planes, Pretoria, 1997

  Arthur Steele, Flowers for the King: The Expedition of Ruiz and Pavon and the Flora of Peru, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 1964

  Disease

  P. Ashburn, The Ranks of Death: A Medical History of the Conquest of America, Coward-McCann, New York, 1947

  Philip D. Curtin, Disease and Empire: The Health of European Troops in the Conquest of Africa, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998

  H. Cushing, Life of Sir William Osler (2 vols), Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1925

  Gerald N. Grob, The Deadly Truth: A History of Disease in America, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2002

  J. Keevil, Medicine and the Navy 1200–1900 (4 vols), Livingstone, Edinburgh and London, 1957–63

  Paul de Kruif, Microbe Hunters, Harcourt Brace, Orlando, Florida, 1926

  Mary Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999

  Paul E. Steiner, Disease in the Civil War, Charles C. Thomas, Springfield, Illinois, 1968

  Malaria in Literature

  Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone, 1860

  George Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, 1901

  Henry Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines, 1886

  Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, 1862

  Henry James, Daisy Miller, 1879

  Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, 1881

  Carlo Levi, Cristo si è fermato a Eboli, 1945

  Jules Verne, L’île mysterieuse, 1870

  Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Little House on the Prairie, 1935

  Malaria in History

  Leonard Bruce-Chwatt and J. de Zulueta, The Rise and Fall of Malaria in Europe: A Historico-Epidemiological Study, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1980

  Robert S. Desowitz, The Malaria Capers: Tales of Parasites and Peoples, Norton, New York, 1993

  Gordon Harrison, Mosquitoes, Malaria and Man: A History of Hostilities Since 1880, John Murray, London, 1978

  Mark Honigsbaum, The Fever Trail: The Hunt for a Cure for Malaria, Macmillan, London, 2001

  J. Jaramillo-Arango, The Conquest of Malaria, William Heinemann, London, 1950

  Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present, HarperCollins, London, 1997

  Ronald Ross, The Prevention of Malaria, John Murray, London, 1910

  Ronald Ross, Memoirs, John Murray, London, 1923

  Ronald Ross, Memories of Sir Patrick Manson, Harrison & Sons, London, 1930

  Paul F. Russell, Man’s Mastery of Malaria, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1955

  James S. Simmons, Malaria in Panama, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1939

  Andrew Spielman and Michael d’Antonio, Mosquito: The Story of Mankind’s Deadliest Foe, Faber & Faber, London, 2001

  Leon J. Warshaw, Malaria: The Biography of a Killer, Rinehart & Co., New York, 1949

  Christopher Willis, Yellow Fever, Black Goddess: Plagues, their Origins, History and Future, HarperCollins, London, 1996

  Exploration and War

  Richard L. Blanco, Wellington’s Surgeon-General: Sir James McGrigor, Duke University Press, North Carolina, 1974

  Philippe Bunau-Varilla, Panama: The Creation, Destruction and Resurrection, Librairie Plon, Paris, 1903

  Robert Bwire, Bugs in Armor: A Tale of Malaria and Soldiering, Universe.com, Lincoln, Nebraska, 1999

  Albert E. Cowdrey, Fighting for Life: American Military Medicine in World War II, Free Press, New York, 1994

  Richard B. Frank, Guadalcanal: The Definitive Account of a Landmark Battle, Random House, New York, 1990

  M.D. Gorgas and B.J. Hendrick, William Crawford Gorgas, Lea & Febiger, Philadelphia, 1924

  John Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas, Macmillan, London, 1970

  David McCullough, The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870–1914, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1977

  A.B.C. Sibthorpe, The History of Sierra Leone, Frank Cass & Co., London, 1970 (first edition 1868)

  Botany

  Wilfrid Blunt, In for a Penny: A Prospect of Kew Gardens, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1978

  G.H. Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanical Gardens, Academic Press, New York and London, 1979

  E. St John Brooks, Sir Hans Sloane: The Great Collector and his Circle, The Batchworth Press, London, 1954

  G. R. de Beer, Sir Hans Sloane and the British Museum, Oxford University Press, London, 1953

  Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2000

  Antonio Brack Egg, Diccionario Enciclopedico de Plantas Utiles del Perú, Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos Bartolomé de las Ca
sas, Cuzco, 1999

  Victor von Hagen, South America Called Them, Robert Hale, London, 1949

  Margaret Krieg, Green Medicine: The Search for Plants that Heal, Rand McNally, Chicago, 1964

  Sue Minter, The Apothecaries’ Garden: A History of Chelsea Physic Garden, Sutton, London, 2000

  Toby and Will Musgrave, An Empire of Plants: People and Plants that Changed the World, Cassell, London, 2000

  Toby Musgrave, Chris Gardner and Will Musgrave, The Plant Hunters: Two Hundred Years of Adventure and Discovery Around the World, Ward Lock, London, 1998

  H. Waller (ed.), The Last Journal of David Livingstone in Central Africa (2 vols), London, 1874

  INDEX

  The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader’s search tools.

  Académie Nationale de Médicine, Paris 254