Quina (cinchona bark) and its transfer out of Peru
Cinchona bark — quina, cascarilla — was the first specific against malaria, and the fullest Spanish account of it is the Quinología published at Madrid in 1792 by Hipólito Ruiz, first botanist of the royal expedition to Peru. He states that the Indians of Loxa knew its virtue before the Spaniards reached Peru, weighs who deserves the credit, and records what a century and a half of trade did to the forests the bark came from.
Why this wins its question: The cinchona story circulates as an anecdote about a countess and a fever, with the bark's Andean origin reduced to a line and the name Cinchona left unexplained. The 1792 treatise says considerably more, and this object quotes it from the page: the royal botanist's own statement that the Indians of Loxa knew the remedy before the conquest, the hospital trials ordered in Lima before the Vicereine was dosed, the explicit division of credit that ends with the viceroys and not the informant in the botanical name, the decades in which European physicians vilified the drug on a Hippocratic aphorism, and the deterioration of the montes and the adulteration that success produced. Achievement, motive and cost from one document, none of it inferred.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The account used here is Hipólito Ruiz's "Quinologia, o tratado del arbol de la quina ó cascarilla, con su descripcion y la de otras especies de quinos nuevamente descubiertas en el Perú", printed at Madrid "en la Oficina de la Viuda é Hijo de Marin" in 1792, its author styled "primer Botánico de la Expedicion del Perú, Agregado al Real Jardin de Madrid, é Individuo de la Real Academia Médica Matritense".
Ruiz opens by claiming the transfer for Spain in the same breath as the conquest, which is how the case was actually made at the time and is reproduced here rather than softened: of all known remedies none is "tan poderoso, tan seguro en sus efectos, ni dotado de tantas virtudes como la Cascarilla del Perú", and "A la Nacion Española se deben sin disputa, asi como la Conquista de aquellos Reynos, las primeras nociones que se comunicaron á Europa de este específico".
The same author gives the priority to the Andean peoples, in the first sentence of the treatise proper: "Es probable que los Indios de la Provincia de Loxa, tuvieron nociones de la virtud de la Quina ó Cascarilla, y puesto en práctica el uso contra las fiebres intermitentes muchos años antes que los Españoles conquistasen el Perú." He puts it as a probability, not as a documented fact, and it is reported here on the same terms.
The trees are exclusively American: Ruiz notes that they are "exclusivamente propios de aquellos paises de América, pues no hay noticia de que se produzcan en ninguna de las otras tres partes del mundo", so that everything Europe used had to be carried from the Andes.
The transmission story Ruiz collected in Peru puts an unnamed indigenous man at the start of it: about 1636 an Indian of the province of Loxa told the Corregidor, who was suffering intermittent fevers, of the bark's virtue; the Corregidor asked him for the cortezas and for the method of using them, which was to infuse an arbitrary quantity in common water — how much was left to "el alcance é inteligencia del Indio", the Indian's own reach and understanding — and drink some doses, "como lo practican general y comunmente los Indios con todo vegetal"; he was free of his fevers in a few days.
What followed was a hospital trial before a courtly one. In 1638, learning that the Vicereine of Peru had tercianas, the Corregidor wrote to the Viceroy Don Gerónimo Fernández de Cabrera, Conde de Chinchón, and sent a portion of the bark; the Viceroy, holding that nobody could administer it better than the Corregidor himself, called him to Lima and ordered him to make the experiments in the hospitals on other tercian patients before it was given to his wife. With the Hospital's physicians he did so, the patients were free of their fevers within a few days, and the Vicereine then took it and recovered.
The distribution that made it European was partly charitable and wholly outside the market at first: the Countess, in gratitude, "empezó á distribuirla gratuitamente", from which the remedy took the name Polvos de la Condesa, later Polvos de los Jesuitas after she handed portions to the Society on leaving Lima in 1640 for them to spread its use; the Procurador General of that kingdom took the occasion of a journey to Rome to send a quantity to Cardinal de Lugo, and it was dispensed at the principal Jesuit college there. Ruiz adds, on La Condamine's authority, that Doctor Juan de Vega, physician to the Chinchóns, sold the first pounds in Spain in 1640 at a hundred reales.
Ruiz then divides the credit explicitly, and the division explains the plant's name: "No se le puede negar al Indio el merito de la noticia dada por él á su Corregidor de Loxa, y menos á éste el de comunicar tan precioso específico á los Virreyes Condes de Chinchon; pero debemos confesar que estos últimos fueron el móvil principal para la propagacion de la noticia de su eficacia" — and therefore deserved that Linnaeus immortalise them in the genus. The man from Loxa is not named anywhere in the account; the viceregal couple are carried in the botanical name of every cinchona tree. In a footnote Ruiz objects that Linnaeus should have written Chinchona, not Cinchona.
European medicine resisted the remedy for decades. In the first years the pound was valued at six pesos fuertes in Peru and twelve in Spain, then fell away because most physicians of that century "despreciaban y vituperaban su uso", partly from the ordinary aversion to novelty and partly on a Hippocratic aphorism holding fevers to be an excretion by which nature evacuates morbific matter — so that a bark which stopped the fever without producing any sensible excretion was suspected of merely postponing it.
Success then wrecked the supply. As the bark's credit reached Africa and Asia, consumption grew until fine cascarilla began to run short in the neighbourhood of Loxa, and gatherers not practised in the registry of the montes made up the shortfall with barks of inferior species and of trees very different from the genus — the Macrocnemum, Portlandia and Psychotria among them. New districts were opened to supply the trade in Quito, Cuenca, Jaén de Bracamoros, Caxamarca and Caxamarquilla, and in the montes of Riobamba, Zaruma, Caxanuma, Huaranda, Uritusinga and Alausí. The treatise's own table of contents lists "el deterioro de sus montes" and "su restablecimiento" as subjects.
Ruiz argued for plantation rather than extraction, and diagnosed why it was not happening. Reasoning from the parallel of the cultivated coca leaf, whose wild form "no tiene uso ni estimacion alguna", he held that cultivated cascarilla would be more valuable and more efficacious, and that these reasons should be enough to move every cascarillero to establish a hacienda de cascarillos — except that "el natural del hombre le inclina generalmente á desear ver en breve tiempo logrado el fruto de su trabajo", so that men who could plant productive trees on their holdings do not.
Ruiz's own standing rests on fieldwork he describes: in 1779 he recognised the true cascarillo in flower in the Montañas de Cuchero, Provincia de los Panatahuas, "á 85 leguas de Lima, y á mas de 140 de Loxa", determining it by repeated examination of its fruiting; the King had named him first botanist and head of the expedition; and in the four years the party remained in Peru after Dombey withdrew to Europe in 1784 for ill health he brought the species of cascarillos described up to seven.
The cost of the enterprise is recorded in the same prologue. The Flora Peruana y Chilense was to run to 1,300 species and 2,500 descriptions, but some had already lost the drawings that went with them: the consignment was "remitió y perdió en el Navio del Rey, San Pedro de Alcantara" — 36 pots of living plants and 54 crates holding 800 drawings, plant skeletons, seeds, resins, mineral balsams, stones and shells, birds, fish, dried animals "y muchas curiosidades antiguas de los Indios gentiles". Ruiz breaks off to call it a "pérdida lamentable", set between exclamation marks in the print; a footnote dates the wreck to the night of 2-3 February 1786 on the Papoa rock off Peniche, on the Portuguese coast.
The account is a participant's and shows it. Ruiz is defending both a Spanish claim of priority and the expedition he directed; his history of the first knowledge of the bark rests on oral tradition gathered in Peru and on La Condamine's 1738 memoir to the Paris Academy rather than on documents he produces; and he reports, only to withhold full assent, the tale that lions chewing the quinos to cure their own fevers were the first masters and discoverers of its virtue.