Cinchona another fever remedy. The bark of cinchona can be harvested in a number of ways. One approach was to cut the tree but this and girdling are equally destructive and unsustainable so small strips were cut and various techniques such as "mossing", the application of moss to the cut areas, were used to allow the tree to heal. Other approaches involved coppicing and chopping of side branches which were then stripped of bark. The bark was dried into what were called quills and then powdered for medicinal uses. The bark contains alkaloids, including quinine and quinidine. Cinchona is the only
Tree from the cinchona tree ("Cinchona") and was for a long time the remedy of choice for the treatment of malaria. Aspirin was synthesised to replace the sodium salicylate derived from the bark of willow trees ("Salix") which had unpleasant side effects. The anti-cancer drug Paclitaxel is derived from taxol, a substance found in the bark of the Pacific yew ("Taxus brevifolia"). Other tree based drugs come from the paw-paw ("Carica papaya"), the cassia ("Cassia spp."), the cocoa tree ("Theobroma cacao"), the tree of life ("Camptotheca acuminata") and the downy birch ("Betula pubescens"). The papery bark of the white birch tree