ROMANCE OF QUININE.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LX, Issue 16824, 2 December 1916, Page 8

ROMANCE OF QUININE.

THE DRUG THAT BUILT UP THJS

BRITISH EMPIRE

Nearly three hunded years ago the Countess Cinchona, the -young and beautiful wife of the Spanish Viceroy of Peru, lay at death's door of ia fevei.. And after the regular doctors had done their best—and worst—by cupping, bleeding, and so forth, she was cured by a bitter decoction of the bark of a ties given her by her Indian servant.

She took some of the bark to Spain. Gradually the use of it as a medicine spread throughout Europe, and Linnaeus, the great Swedish botanist, named the tree from which it came, Cinchona, in her honour. The tree is still so called, but the drug prepared from the bark is known as quinine, from the old Peruvian name, " quina-quina," which means "bark rf barks."

It is the literal truth that this marvellous medicine built up the Britisn Empire. Quinine Avon us India, because without its aid in conquering fevers, British troops could not ha^o lived and fought there. .

Still more did it win us Africa. There are vast districts in the heart of that continent where even now no white man dare venture -without taking with him a plentiful supply of the precious drug. Quinine was almost food and drink to Kitchener's army on the toilsome march to Khartum. Without '•t the Soudan could not have been won to civilisation.

The reason, of course,- is that malarial arid other fevers, the curse of most tropical countries, aro spread by mosquitoes, and quinine kills the disea.w jrenns that the insects introduce mto the blood. v