The Miraculous Fever-Tree: Malaria, Medicine and the Cure that Changed the World
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A rich and wonderful history of quinine – the cure for malaria.In the summer of 1623, ten cardinals and hundreds of their attendants, engaged in electing a new Pope, died from the 'mal'aria' or 'bad air' of the Roman marshes. Their choice, Pope Urban VIII, determined that a cure should be found for the fever that was the scourge of the Mediterranean, northern Europe and America, and in 1631 a young Jesuit apothecarist in Peru sent to the Old World a cure that had been found in the New – where the disease was unknown.The cure was quinine, an alkaloid made of the bitter red bark of the cinchona tree, which grows in the Andes. Both disease and cure have an extraordinary history. Malaria badly weakened the Roman Empire. It killed thousands of British troops fighting Napoleon during the Walcheren raid on Holland in 1809 and many soldiers on both sides of the American Civil War. It turned back many of the travellers who explored west Africa and brought the building of the Panama Canal to a standstill. When, after a thousand years, a cure was finally found, Europe's Protestants, among them Oliver Cromwell, who suffered badly from malaria, feared it was nothing more than a Popish poison. More than any previous medicine, though, quinine forced physicians to change their ideas about treating illness. Before long, it would change the face of Western medicine.Using fresh research from the Vatican and the Indian Archives in Seville, as well as hitherto undiscovered documents in Peru, Fiammetta Rocco describes the ravages of the disease, the quest of the three Englishmen who smuggled cinchona seeds out of South America, the way quinine opened the door to Western imperial adventure in Asia, Africa and beyond, and why, even today, quinine grown in the eastern Congo still saves so many people suffering from malaria.Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.
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Fiammetta Rocco. The Miraculous Fever-Tree: Malaria, Medicine and the Cure that Changed the World
THE MIRACULOUS FEVER-TREE
Fiammetta Rocco
DEDICATION
CONTENTS
MAPS. Early-Eighteenth-Century South America
Central Africa
World Distribution of Malaria
INTRODUCTION The Tree of Fevers
1 Sickness Prevails – Africa
2 The Tree Required – Rome
3 The Tree Discovered – Peru
4 The Quarrel – England
5 The Quest – South America
6 To War and to Explore – From Holland to West Africa
7 To Explore and to War – From America to Panama
8 The Seed – South America
9 The Science – India, England and Italy
10 The Last Forest – Congo
NOTES ON SOURCES. Introduction: The Tree of Fevers
Chapter 1: Sickness Prevails – Africa
Chapter 2: The Tree Required – Rome
Chapter 3: The Tree Discovered—Peru
Chapter 4: The Quarrel – England
Chapter 5: The Quest – South America
Chapter 6: To War and to Explore – from Holland to West Africa
Chapter 7: To Explore and to War – From America to Panama
Chapter 8: The Seed – South America
Chapter 9: The Science: India, England and Italy
Chapter 10: The Last Forest—Congo
FURTHER READING. Cinchona and Quinine
Disease
Malaria in Literature
Malaria in History
Exploration and War
Botany
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR. THE MIRACULOUS FEVER-TREE
PRAISE
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
Отрывок из книги
Malaria, medicine and the cure that changed the world
Title Page
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There were dangerous animals, savage tribesmen and, always, the threat of disease: sleeping sickness, river blindness, yaws, leprosy, trachoma, typhoid, tick fever, filariasis, beriberi, bilharzia, kwashiorkor, rinderpest and East Coast Fever were just a few of the ailments waiting in Africa. Of the many illnesses threatening both man and beast, though, none seems to have preyed on travellers’ minds as much as that which became known in many parts as the ‘pioneer shakes’ – malaria.
Some diseases were terrifying simply because they were deadly. Yellow fever and malaria’s cousin, blackwater fever, which turns your urine the colour of dark Burgundy and your kidneys into fragile sacs that can burst at the slightest movement, are like poisonous snakes: they kill in a matter of hours. But there is something particularly insidious about the way malaria stalks its victims, the way its parasites lurk within the body, hiding from its immune system and lying silent for years until you think you have finally shaken it off, only to find that it always returns, driving you mad with fever, shivering, delirium and pain, weakening you more with every bout before, often, it eventually kills you. As the malaria parasite reproduces in your blood, it swells and bursts out of your red blood cells, leaving in its wake a sludge of wrecked haemoglobin. Some of this material ends up in the liver and the spleen, causing them to swell and turn black. In the unlucky few the parasite accumulates in the capillaries of the brain, causing the cerebral malaria that kills so fast.
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