Quinine early history

Perhaps the most fascinating old chiral drug, from a historical point of view, is quinine. Its earhest history is obscure, but it is known that by the early 1600s it was being used by South American natives in Peru, Ecuador, and neighboring regions... 

Reserpine and vincaleukoblastine represent the most important plant-derived medicinals introduced into medicine by our generation, and it is instructive to compare their history with those of morphine and quinine. Descriptions of the use of extracts of plants resembling Rauwolfia may be traced back to ancient Hindu ayurvedic writings. They were used in primitive Hindu medicine for a variety of diseases, including snake bite, hypertension, insomnia, and insanity. The early remedies were used for various other purposes, but it seems clear now that our present day application of Rauwolfia alkaloids in treating hypertension and mental disease was foreshadowed in the folk medicine of the Eastern peoples. 

History. Quinine has been listed as one of the six most important plant products that have influenced human history [160]. Cinchona, or "Quinine Bark" is one of the most famous plants from South America and most important discoveries. Legend says that the name "cinchona" comes from the Countess of Chinchon, the wife of a viceroy of Peru, who was cured in 1638 of a malarial type of fever by using the bark of the Cinchona tree. The legend starts with a misspelled name, continues with an extract named mistakenly by Linnaeus in 1742 as "quinquina", and maintains the reputed traditional use of plant extract for a disease probably introduced to that continent by Europeans and their African slaves [see 161, 162, 6]. Quinine bark was used by the Jesuits very early in its history, first advertized for sale in England in 1658 and was made official in the London Pharmacopoeia in 1677. 

Chemistry of Cinchona alkaloids has a very long history considering that purified quinine was available in Europe as early as in 1820. The seminal transformations of the Cinchona alkaloids, including, for example, the Pasteur s chinotoxine preparation by the treatment of quinine with a weak acid [108], were mainly directed toward the stmcture elucidation and remained very intuitive until the beginning of the twentieth century when P. Rabe solved the problem of quinine constitution [5, 26, 27, 29, 109,110]. Nevertheless, a detailed stereochemistry of the Cinchona alkaloids was determined finally by Prelog et al. in 1950 [111]. The X-ray structures of major Cinchona alkaloids 1-4 have been published [112-116] as well, and their conformation was determined in past two decades by a combined NMR and/or computational approach [117-121]. 

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