Cinchona for quinine production. While ultimately successful in their primary aim, these expeditions also identified new species of plants and created a new chapter in international relations between the United States and other nations in the Americas. Francesco Torti used the response of fevers to treatment with cinchona as a system of classification of fevers or a means for diagnosis. The use of cinchona in the effective treatment of malaria brought an end to treatment by bloodletting and long-held ideas of humorism from Galen. For his part in obtaining and helping the establishment of cinchona in British India Clements Markham was
History of pharmacy in the United States number of programs in the history of medicine, history of pharmacy programs remain few in number in the United States. As soon as Columbus started his explorations of the Americas in the late 15th century, a European effort to find valuable medicinal plants among the flora of the New World to add to the medical canon got underway. Early New World medicines uncovered included guaiacum from the West Indies (for coughs, rheumatism and a wide variety of other uses), sassafras from Florida, copaiba from Brazil, Peru balsam and, most famously, cinchona bark from Peru, also called "Jesuit's bark" in honor