#also of course i cannot resist bringing up paracelsus

[icryyoumercy]

@nimblermortal

first, because these things are important nowadays, i am not a medical professional, this is not professional medical advice, the WHO has helpful information about malaria, when living or travelling in a region where malaria happens, mosquito repellent and appropriate protective gear are mandatory and non-negotiable, and so on

quinine is made from tree bark, which makes it one of the two medically useful things made from tree bark i know of, and also makes me wonder how people learn these things. were they just. walking around biting random trees. is the desire to chew on tree bark just part of what makes humans human.

it has initially been used as a muscle relaxant by the quechua people, to treat uh. random shivering? which is apparently a thing people sometimes do? which i could look into, but then i'd probably get distracted

the spaniards brought it back to europe, as they did with so many things, and because things like germ theory and microbiology and chemistry were still centuries from being discovered, what people knew of malaria was that it causes fever and thus shivering with very noticeable periodicity. and they had just been told about a thing that can stop shivering, so might as well give it a shot. if the symptoms are all you are aware of, the symptoms are all you can treat.

and for some utterly baffling reason, it turned out it didn't just help against shivering, it actually cured malaria? which. wasn't what anyone was aiming for, but gift horses and all that.

rome, being located very conveniently in a swamp, and having a rather inconvenient amount of popes and other people important to the catholic church, was perfectly located to pioneer such treatment and make a great many of the rich and powerful (and thus by advertisment of word of mouth and rumor everyone else) want some more of this marvellous drug, which made quinine (that is, the bark it's extracted from) one of peru's most important stolen goods

then, of course, a lot of fucked up colonialism happened (including in africa, because it's hard to do colonialism while dying of malaria), because europeans were unwilling to engage in things like fair and equal trade with non-europeans, we get fun medical price gouging and attempts at monopolies and general unpleasantness, and someone finally managed to isolate the exact chemical compound instead of just grinding up the bark and mixing it with something that tastes better than tree bark

and around the 1940s, malaria treatments with fewer unpleasant side effects were discovered (which i know nothing about and won't look up because adhd), and by 2006 the WHO has declared that quinine shouldn't be used as the first choise in treating malaria for a variety of reasons, including resistant strains and aforementioned side effects

also, if you're really curious about the taste, tonic water is traditionally made with quinine, and has been used as a prophylactic against malaria. once it wasn't used for that purpose any longer, though, people have decided to add less quinine and more sugar and citrus because they didn't enjoy just how incredibly bitter that stuff was. also, the FDA says you can't have more than 83 ppm of quinine per liter of tonic water, so if you wanted to treat malaria with it, you'd need to drink some ten liters per day, and if you want to use it for prevention, you'd need around 20 liters per day, at which point malaria seems like the better option

what tonic water can help with, on the other hand, is muscle cramps! not sure how much of that is the quinine and how much is the placebo effect, but at that point, we're back to readily available and comparatively harmless

either way, in the 1860's, it was one of the few actually working medical things (along with chloroform and diethyl ether for general anaesthesia, and opium for pain relief), so they will throw it at anything that has even the slightest ressemblance to periodic fever (to be fair, a number of other things they did also had the required medical effects, they just ran afoul of paracelsus's basic adage of toxicity

Alle Dinge sind Gift, und nichts ist ohne Gift; allein die Dosis macht, dass ein Ding kein Gift ist. All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison.

—Paracelsus, 1538

by reaching the poisonous dosage at the same or a much earlier point than the therapeutic dosage)