the.com/quinine
the bitter bark that beat malaria, built the British Empire, and invented the gin and tonic
means A bitter compound extracted from cinchona tree bark, historically the primary medicine for treating and preventing malaria.
from From the Spanish 'quina,' itself borrowed from the Quechua word 'kina,' meaning 'bark' — the language of the Andean peoples who knew the cinchona tree long before Europeans arrived. Spanish colonizers and Jesuit missionaries carried the bark back across the Atlantic in the 1600s, where it became known as 'Jesuit's bark' or 'Peruvian bark.' The chemical itself wasn't isolated and named until the early 19th century, when French chemists drew the '-ine' suffix from the older plant name.
- tree source
- Extracted from cinchona tree bark in the Andes
- tonic glow
- Fluoresces electric blue under ultraviolet light
- empire fuel
- Let colonizers survive the tropics they conquered
- cocktail birth
- Soldiers added gin to choke down medicinal tonic
- still legal
- Regulated dose limits how bitter your drink gets
tonic water — carbonated drink with quinine added for bitter flavor, popularized in india during british colonial rule
cinchona bark — source tree from peru/ecuador that european colonists extracted quinine from starting in the 1600s
malaria treatment — quinine was the primary antimalarial drug from the 1800s until synthetic alternatives emerged in the 1930s