Quinine London. It remained the antimalarial drug of choice until the 1940s, when other drugs took over. The form of quinine most effective in treating malaria was found by Charles Marie de La Condamine in 1737. In 1820, French researchers Pierre Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Bienaimé Caventou first isolated quinine from the bark of a tree in the genus "Cinchona" - probably "Cinchona officinalis" - and subsequently named the substance. The name was derived from the original Quechua (Inca) word for the cinchona tree bark, "quina" or "quina-quina", which means "bark of bark" or "holy bark". Prior to 1820, the bark
Cinchona and Louis Bouger that was sent to Ecuador to determine the length of a degree of the 1/4 of meridian arc in the neighbourhood of the equator, was published by the French Academy of Sciences. In it he identified three separate species. The birth of homeopathy was based on cinchona bark testing. The founder of homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann, when translating William Cullen's "Materia medica", noticed Cullen had written that Peruvian bark was known to cure intermittent fevers. Hahnemann took daily a large, rather than homeopathic, dose of Peruvian bark. After two weeks, he said he felt malaria-like symptoms. This idea