52 
Up to the seventeenth century, our efforts in the direction of its 
treatment were scarcely more successful than in ascertaining its 
nature. It was known that substances which were tonic ren- 
in all diseases, and that some of these vegetable bitter tonics 
seemed to exert a stronger preventive action in this than in other 
diseases ; it was also known that arsenic, mercury and some other 
drugs seemed markedly to check its development and favor re- 
covery ; but until the year 1638, the world knew of no substance 
which could be justly regarded as specifically fatal to the ‘un- 
known cause of the malarial disease. In that year it was made 
known that a royal personage of Spain had been cured of malaria 
by the use of a bark brought to her attention by the Jesuit mis- 
sionaries in the tropical South American Andes, and on this 
account it was long known as Jesuits’ Bark. It was also, for 
other reasons, called Crown Bark, Peruvian Bark, Quina, etc. 
Ignorance, prejudice, jealousy, ultra-conservatism and mistaken 
and presumptuous theology met it with an unusually liberal 
share of that opposition which falls to the lot of most drugs, and 
which does not a little toward establishing their success, if worthy. 
This opposition helped to make it known and to secure its 
trial, and the result of trial proved its special activity. From 
having used it experimentally, physician and patients alike came 
to rely upon it with security, and its use became world-wide. 
Early in the nineteenth century efforts, many of which had formerly 
been unsuccessful, resulted in the discovery of a crystalline con- 
stituent having the medicinal action of the bark in a degree greater 
than the latter, in proportion to its existing percentage. This 
was cinchonine and its discovery was soon followed, in a differ- 
ent variety of bark, by that of the more energetic alkaloid qui- 
nine. The extension and use of these alkaloids did something 
of far greater importance than to contribute to the convenience of 
physicians, oer ie travellers and armies and of those who de- 
sired to fort y themselves against anticipated attacks of the dis- 
and other influences pertaining to the modern exact sciences 
