The discovery of quinine marked the beginning of modern pharmacology.
The first recorded account use of quinine came at the Viceregal Place in Lima, Peru, in 1638 when the illness of the Countess Cinchon, Francisca Henriquez de Ribera became so severe, that it was said, the court physician risked a desperate, last chance remedy with medicine he had heard was used for fever in the unhealthy gold mining district of Loja, not far from Quito.
The cure for malaria cam to Europe by way of the New World. In the 1600s Jesuit missionaries in Brazil and Peru began grinding up and chewing cinchona bark as a medicinal treatment for malaria.
In 1820, two French scientists, Pierre-Joseph Pelletier (1788-1877) and Joseph Bienaimé Caventou (1795-1877) identified and extracted the active ingredient an alkaloid from cinchona (or quina) bark and named it quinine. The purified compound began to be used instead of powdered bark to treat malaria.
After discovery of quinine several chemists thought that a third uncrystallizable alkaloid occurs in the barks of the cinchonas.
In 1828 Friedrich Wohler synthesized urea form ammonium chloride and silver cyanate, both considered minerals and showed that organic compounds might be made from inorganic ones.
This process, along with Hermann Kolbe’s preparation of acetic acid in 1845, gave hope to some that quinine might soon be artificially-synthetically-formed.
By 1830 quinine was being manufactured on a large scale and by the 1840s European in Africa were keeping pills by their bedstands. The death rate from malaria dropped dramatically.
In 1854, Adolph Strecker at the University of Christiana, Oslo determined quinines empirical formula.
In 1944, the structure of the alkaloid molecule (C20H24N2O2) was discovered.
Discovery of Quinine
Learn history of medicine, learn how the medicine provide explanations for birth, death and disease. History of medicine shows how ideas have developed over the centuries, and medicine had arrived at its modern state through the course of history.
Friday, February 15, 2013
The most popular articles
-
Biography of Hippocrates Hippocrates is referred to ‘father of medicine’ in recognition of his lasting contributions to the field as the ...
-
Jean-Martin Charcot (29 November 1825 – 16 August 1893) was the son of a carriage-maker. He was the son and grandson of Parisian carriage ma...
-
According to the CDC, arthritis accounts for 18% or nearly 9 million reports of disability, making it the number one cause of adult disabili...
-
In the United States, ALS also is called Lou Gehrig’s disease, named for the Yankees baseball player who died of it in 1941. In Britain and ...
-
Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768-1830) a French mathematician and physicist developed the mathematical methods for converting data between...
-
Lazzaro Spallanzani an Italian physicist is most often credited person for discovering ultrasonography. In 1794, he analyzed the basic mecha...
-
Paracetamol is a very widely used as medicine. It is painkiller and reduces the temperature of patients with fever. These actions are know...
-
In the early 1900s an Italian radiologist named Alessandro Vallebona invented tomography which used radiographic film to see a single slice ...