Quinine barkCinchona pubescens

Did you know?

• The tree is named after the Countess of Chinchón, wife of a 17th-century Spanish viceroy of Peru, but the name lost a letter along the way: Linnaeus spelled it Cinchona^{[5, 6]}.

• The word quinine comes from quina, the Quechua word for the bark, which Europeans also doubled as quina-quina^[7]. In Peru the tree is also called cascarilla^[8].

• A cinchona tree appears on Peru's coat of arms, set by a law of Simón Bolívar in 1825, standing for the country's plant wealth beside a vicuña and a horn of plenty^{[3, 4]}.

• Tonic water is flavored with quinine, which gives it its bitter taste, and US rules allow no more than 83 parts per million of quinine in a soft drink^{[9, 10, 11]}.

• Red cinchona bark is on the US list of natural flavorings, for use in drinks only^{[9, 12]}.

• Planted far from the Andes, red cinchona now grows wild as far away as Hawaii and the Galápagos Islands^[1].

Origins and history

Cinchona is a genus of about two dozen trees and shrubs from the Andes^[2]. They are evergreen, with simple leaves in pairs and clusters of small, fragrant, pink or creamy white flowers at the branch tips^{[2, 9]}. The fruit is a small capsule^{[2, 9]}.

The tree's European story begins with a legend. It was said that the bark reached Europe through the Countess of Chinchón, wife of the Spanish viceroy of Peru. Historians have found little to support the story, but the name stuck: in 1742 Carl Linnaeus named the genus in her honor^{[5, 6]}. By then the bark was known across Europe as Jesuit's bark and Peruvian bark^{[9, 13]}.

In 1820 the French chemists Pierre Pelletier and Joseph Caventou isolated quinine from the bark^{[2, 6, 7]}. Demand grew, and in the mid-1800s British and Dutch collectors carried cinchona seeds out of the Andes to start plantations in India, Sri Lanka and Java^{[2, 6]}. Among them was the Englishman Clements Markham, who brought out seeds of red cinchona, C. succirubra, the name on our label^[6]. A few years later Charles Ledger followed with seeds from Bolivia; his Aymara guide, Manuel Incra Mamani, had taught him the different kinds of cinchona, and the seeds gave their name to Cinchona ledgeriana^[6]. Today most people meet cinchona in a glass of tonic water, the bitter half of every gin and tonic^{[9, 10, 11]}.

Traditional uses

Few clinical studies have looked at the whole bark in people, but its use as a bitter is long and well recorded^{[9, 13]}.

• A classic bitter tonic

  In herbal tradition, cinchona bark has long been taken as a bitter tonic to wake up the appetite. It supports a healthy appetite.*^{[9, 13]}

• Healthy digestion

  The same bitter bark has traditionally been used to encourage the flow of digestive juices. It supports healthy digestion.*^{[9, 13]}

• A bitter for drinks

  Red cinchona bark is used to flavor bitter drinks, and US food rules list it as a natural flavoring for beverages.^{[9, 12]}

Plant compounds

Cinchona bark contains a family of naturally occurring plant compounds known as cinchona alkaloids^[12]. The four main ones are quinine, quinidine, cinchonine and cinchonidine, and quinine is by far the best known^{[6, 9]}.