- 24 - 
LLOYD, J. U. ■ (68) 
ORIGIN AND HISTORY OF ALL THE PHAHiMACOPEIAL VEGETABLE 
DRUGS, CHEMICALS AND PREPARATIONS, with Bibliography. 
Vol. 1, Vegetable Drugs. 449 pp. Cincinnati. 1921. 
" Quassia amara takes its name from a slave of Surinam 
named Quassi, who used the plant a.s a secret remedy with 
great success in the treatment of malignant fevers common 
to his locality and climate. Daniel Rolander, a Swede, 
became interested in the drug, and ' in consequence of a 
valuable consideration' , purchased from the slave Quassi 
a knowledge of the drug composing his remedy. Rolander 
returned to Stockholm in 1756, when he introduced the drug 
to Europe. In 1760 or 1761 Carol Gust. Dahlberg, an officer 
of the Dutch army and an eminent botanist, a pupil of 
Linnaeus, returned to Sweden from Surinam, whore he too 
had become acquainted with the slave Quassi, and through 
kindness to him had so gained his affection that he revealed 
not only the composition of his secret remedy, but even showed 
to him the tree from which the drug was derived. Dahlberg 
procured specimens of the root, flowers, and leaves of the 
tree, preserved them in alcohol, and presented them to Linnaeus, 
who named the wood Ligntun quassiae , in honor of the slave, and 
established a nev; genus for the plant, which he named Quassia 
amara . The drug was brought to the notice of the medical 
profession by Linnaeus' lectures on materia medica, as well as 
through a dissertation written under his direction, in 1763, 
by one of his pupils, Carolus M. Blom, Rather more than a 
questioning, however, seems to exist, as to the exact plant 
employed by the slave Quassi. As pointed out by Wright, the 
leaves pictured in the Linnaean Dissertation belonged to 
another species than the Quassia amara , an error corrected 
by the younger Linnaeus, 
"In this connection it may be stated that Phillipe Fermin, 
a French physician and traveler in Surinam, spelled the 
name of the slave Coissi , questioning somewhat the fact of 
his having discovered the uses of the remedy, which Fermin 
states had been used in Surinam as early as 1714. It may 
also be noted that, according to Murray, a spice dealer of 
Amsterdam, Albert Seba, is said to have had in his collection 
a specimen of a bark of a tree named quasci as early as 1730. 
Be this as it may, the drug known as quassia under the empirical 
introduction given by the native of Dutch Guina became known 
to European civilization, and in 1788 became official in the 
London Pharmacopeia . Concerning the origin of the drug, the 
German Pharmacopeia, 1872, demanded that the wood employed 
be that of Quassia amara . In the second edition, 1882, that 
of Picraena excelsa was concurrently admitted. Either species 
furnishes the official quassia of the present Pharmacopeia of 
the United States " (pp. 259-61). 
