PRESCRIPTION FOR DISASTER

The story of hydroxychloroquine is a strange and twisted tale pitting power against knowledge. Let’s not repeat it

- ADAM ROGERS

CHAPTER ONE: THE JESUIT BARK

In the mid-1600s, a Jesuit priest serving in Peru got a useful tip. The indigenous people there, he learned, were using the bark of a particular kind of tree to treat fevers. The priest, who’d probably gone a few rounds himself with the local diseases, got ahold of some of the reddish-brown bark from this “fever-tree” and shipped it back to Europe. In the 1670s, what came to be called Jesuit bark had made its way into a popular patent medicine, along with rose leaves, lemon juice and wine.

That was the beginning of the impressively effective bark’s role in pharmacology (and its side career in mixology). In the mid-1700s the prolific Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus gave the tree’s genus its name – having heard a fanciful (and untrue) tale about the bark’s success treating the Spanish Countess of Chinchón, he dubbed it Cinchona. In 1820, French chemists isolated the active ingredient, a plant alkaloid they named quinine. Its bitter flavour became not only a hallmark of the prevention and treatment of malaria but also the basis for a medicinal fizzy water – a “tonic” – that mixed well with the gin that Europeans brought with them to their equatorial conquests. Today, quinine can be found in bitters, vermouth and absinthe; next time you order a Manhattan or a Sazerac, give a little l’chaim to the Peruvians.