Spectral Cinchona

Colombian historian Mauricio Nieto begins the fourth chapter of his book Remedios para el Imperio (Remedies for the Empire) by stating that cinchona is probably “the most important plant in the history of medicine” (2006, p. 165). This bombastic statement is not supported by any arguments throughout the chapter; however, it was not the first time I had read it.

It is a relative commonplace, inevitable to find when one immerses oneself in the universe of cinchona. The statement is vague, but everything about cinchona is vague. In fact, in 2008, a law was passed in Peru that made the plant a cultural heritage, but in the wording of the text, cinchona was confused with quinoa.

This hazy nature is also expressed in the fact that the plant appears on the Peruvian coat of arms, even though it is unknown to the population and is in danger of extinction, as its habitat is currently undergoing rapid deforestation.

Quina, like viruses, seems to belong neither to the realm of the living nor to that of the dead; it has a spectral existence, and everything around it appears to be linked to events that permanently disrupt and redefine the boundaries between life and death, or between the living and the non-living.

The persistent spectral nature of the cinchona also came to the fore when I tried to identify what I was researching. A semantic universe immediately emerged, populated by words and expressions such as quino, quinine, quinidine, cinchona, chinchona, cascarilla, “Jesuit powder,” “countess powder,” among others.

At first, I gave in to the urge to classify, positioning myself as a knowing subject and attempting to make a classic phallic mark on this elusive reality. “Quino: tree, also known as the cinchona tree,” “cinchona: bark of the quino tree, often pulverized and macerated for consumption”; “quinine: alkaloid present in cinchona, eventually isolated and synthesized in the laboratory.”

That was the first outline I made. Momentarily, it satisfied my phallic urge, my desire to harden or solidify that spectrality that haunted me and seemed to be two steps ahead of me. But as is well known, phallic desire quickly passes from rigidity to flaccidity. The liquid is expelled in a fleeting manner.

What if what the cinchona exhibited was a type of agency that I refused to perceive? What if, instead of trying to fix or dominate, or perhaps tame, I began to play and dialogue with the cinchona? What was it that I refused to hear or perceive that the cinchona was trying to express by all possible means, albeit always stealthily, without shouting or commanding? What was the quina demanding in the midst of its spectral dissemination, without having to say “I think” (ego cogito)?

It was questions like these that led me to change my strategy. From now on, the quina would be a figuration for me, that is, not a passive object of study, but a fiction that refers to multiple flows, threads, forces, or relationships that condense into various actors or historical entities, not all of them human. My methodology was inspired by Deleuze, Foucault, Braidotti, and Haraway, so that the historiographical impulse became a genealogical game, while the lack of a “real object” gave way to “science fiction.”

Ultimately, all science is science fiction, since “facts” are always made; they have been fabricated in force fields or lines that are more than human and constantly redefine them. In this sense, I would like to tell the story not of how cinchona was discovered, transported, and transformed by Man, but of how the latter has been made possible, in part, by the action of cinchona itself and other actors.

The cinchona probably has an eminently elusive character because it is the sovereignty of the white man, the owner and enlightened one, that depends on the plant, and not the other way around. Only in this way could the idea that it has a particularly prominent place in the history of medicine make sense again, for perhaps without this plant there would have been no specifically modern human body, which, like cinchona itself, seems to be on the verge of extinction. Similarly, it is only in this new context that it becomes useful again to consider the distinction between cinchona, cinchona bark, and quinine.

Fantastic stories and science fiction

In Security, Territory, Population, Foucault (2006) proposed three figurations to understand various exercises of power and fields of force, which have been historically recomposed and given rise to various entities. Three figurations: leprosy, plague, and smallpox. Leprosy involves an exercise of power that excludes and condemns to death; the plague, on the contrary, leads to the typical confinement of the quarantined so that the body can recover its strength; smallpox, associated with vaccination campaigns, involves managing large populations through statistics, techniques of behavioral anticipation, modeling of vital media, and self-government.

Sovereign power, disciplinary power, and bioregulation/security devices/neoliberal technologies of government. These are the exercises of power that Foucault invites us to think about through the three figurations of leprosy, the plague, and smallpox. The plague, which corresponds to what Foucault called the classical era (17th century), can be understood as a figuration that accounts for the transition between the old world of sovereignty and the new world of biopower proper, that is, between a power that manifests its potency “by making people die” (mass executions in public squares, exclusion of lepers) and one that expresses it by “making live” and meticulously controlling the dynamics of life.

In this story, Man would have been nothing more than a face in the sand, condemned to be erased at the edge of the sea, as the techniques, technologies, and devices that made it possible between the mid-17th and mid-19th centuries would be overtaken from within by forces that invite us to think in terms of information, vital media, and behavioral anticipation, for which the human device is not so relevant, since the entire reality, human or not, is reduced to its basic unit: data and its apparent operations of infinite translatability.

Societies are reduced to communication operations, biology to genetic information, and physics to chemical and subatomic information. The molecularization of reality, its conversion into information, makes it possible for virtuallyeverything to be composed and decomposed with everything else, and for everything to be transmuted into anything else. “One day, the century will be Deleuzian,” Foucault enigmatically asserted; he does not seem to have been wrong. So what could quinine tell us as a figuration?

According to most historiographical studies, it is almost impossible to refer to cinchona without referring to colonial history and the history of malaria. According to certain sources, it was Jesuit missionaries who first turned their attention to the plant in the 17th century, as they realized that it could be used as a medicine for malaria. On the other hand, it seems that the Jesuits acquired this knowledge from the natives, who had already used the properties of the cinchona tree.

It is not clear whether they did so, but in any case, complex narratives were developed about how the indigenous people discovered the medicinal properties of the plant. Mauricio Nieto does not hesitate to describe such narratives as “fantastic folk tales” (2006, p. 167). It is said, for example, that the natives detected the medicinal properties of the bark of the cinchona tree when they saw that wild cats chewed it when they had a fever, or that the wind blew cinchona trees into a lake and an indigenous person drank the bitter water with the unexpected result that his fever was relieved.

Be that as it may, the Jesuits gained a monopoly on the new medicine: powdered cinchona bark, which is also said to have cured the Countess of Chinchón, wife of the viceroy of Peru, although it is unclear whether this actually happened. One account indicates that it was the viceroy's Jesuit doctor and confessor who provided him with the medicine, which is why powdered cinchona began to be called “Jesuit powder” and “countess powder.” It is also said that the palatine princess, who was close to Louis XIV, was cured by these healing powders, while Cromwell preferred death to “becoming a Jesuit.”

Quina was the subject of all kinds of disputes over its classification between the 18th and 19th centuries, involving prestigious naturalists with their respective commercial interests, such as La Condamine, Linnaeus, Humboldt, and Mutis. The truth is that Linnaeus named the genus Cinchona by Italianizing the word Chinchona and, of course, based on the story of the countess, who is said to have had it made to make its consumption acceptable and civilized for Europeans.

All this, like the classifications of cinchona, is deeply murky and makes it difficult for us to distinguish science from fiction and narratives from factual history. Facts are always facts; facts made up of countless threads that weave the stories that make history. It is impossible, but above all inconvenient, to separate “fantastical popular stories” from “real history.”

Quinine requires us to partially abandon the history that leads us to believe that we must move from a “clouded” (qualitative and interpretative) view to a ‘correct’ or “clear and distinct” (quantitative, based on falsifiable hypotheses and reconstructed through controlled experiments) one.

The history of the “correct” view has a particular aesthetic, that of realism, and a political one, that of order and progress. It is a narrative that privileges and contributes to the establishment of certain ways of life over others, especially that of the average bourgeois citizen as lord and master of nature, superior to primitive existences (Haraway, 2022).

If we take “fantastical folk tales” seriously, we could assume that indigenous communities already knew about the properties of cinchona, but that they had developed this knowledge with the help of other entities such as wild cats, water, air, and the cinchona tree itself, which possesses its own evolutionary wisdom.

In this way, these narratives cease to be ways of denying agency to the natives, since their fatal interpretation could be that their knowledge is merely casuistic or accidental, like that of nature in general, and instead become ways of perceiving an agency differentially distributed in assemblages or arrangements involving different entities. In short, the narratives allude to possible non-anthropocentric epistemes capable of activating our decolonial imagination.

In contrast, the viceroy's hypothetical Jesuit confessor and physician would be recounting a very different link with cinchona, through which it becomes a proto-modern medicine. This takes place within the framework of a protomodern doctor-patient relationship, which has its antecedents in pastoral power and, precisely, the technique of confession. This type of relationship is akin to the development of disciplinary or confinement institutions, such as hospitals, for which the plague is a good representation.

In keeping with this pattern, the disputes between the aforementioned naturalists over the classification of the plant, and thus obtaining its commercial monopoly, would condense the gradual configuration of cinchona as a passive object of knowledge and exchange for subjects who claim the “discovery” of the entire world through various colonial enterprises or expeditions. It is the sovereign solitude of a single agent: the ego conquiro turned into ego cogito; that transitory face of sand called Man.

Anthropogenesis

“And cinchona made Man...” We might think that this is a good sentence for a pre-modern myth, but the curious thing is that, on the contrary, this idea is particularly useful when making a small genealogical approximation to the typically modern human. Approaching anthropogenesis in this way could also, albeit in an unconventional way, clarify the assertion that cinchona is probably the most important plant in the history of medicine.

Quinine as a medicine, as William Eamon (2018) has argued, like corn and cochineal, was first developed by indigenous peoples, probably within non-anthropocentric epistemes open to the confluence of the technical-symbolic with the organic and inorganic.

The Jesuits and the first naturalists, chemists, doctors, and botanists of European origin acquired much of their knowledge from the native peoples, but at the same time, and this is the most interesting part of Eamon's argument, through this asymmetrical encounter, the Baroque-medieval European epistemes definitively transitioned to strictly modern epistemes, with their respective conceptions of the body and medicine, positioning Man (white, owner, etc.) as the sole agent and hero of the plot.

Between the 17th and 19th centuries, European medicine was still heavily influenced by the paradigms associated with Galen and Hippocrates. The Hippocratic doctrine of the four humors was particularly difficult to shake off. According to this doctrine, the human body was composed of four humors that were differentially balanced according to each individual's inclinations: blood, phlegm, and black and yellow bile.

These humors, although arranged in different ways according to each individual's constitution, had to find a double balance, both internally and in relation to the natural order and its flows. Thus, disease was seen as an imbalance both in the natural equilibriums inherent in the organism and in relation to the general natural order.

Deep down, people believed in an animated or enchanted nature thanks to divine will, since God, having created the natural order, would also have given it the ability to repair itself, even if it sometimes took time. Health was synonymous with order and illness with disorder. Time was the best medicine, since, ultimately, God works through nature, through his own creations.

In line with the doctrine of humors, doctors often recommended a whole lifestyle regimen for the cure of diseases, which included diet, control of emotions, relationships with one's own body and with others, among many other relevant aspects. In contrast to theologically legitimized doctors, “chemists” and “charlatans” offered all kinds of specific medicines to treat ailments.

In the eyes of those who subscribed to the most classical epistemes, ‘chemists’ and “charlatans” were primarily merchants of objects who were ignorant of human nature and the natural-divine order. However, the emergence of capitalist relations, akin to the “disenchantment of the world,” and of new rationalist and empiricist ideas, as well as the opening up to non-Western techniques and epistemes that had been constantly obliterated, allowed the distances between doctors, chemists, and merchants to gradually shorten, generating a new image of the body and of medicine itself as a modern science.

The case of the Valencian physician and professor of anatomy Andrés Piquer is illustrative. Piquer gained some recognition with the publication, in 1751, of the Treatise on Fevers. In this work, the Valencian physician, aligned with the doctrine of humors, asserted that the best cure was, in fact, that provided by God through the influence of the nature he had created.

Nature was also projected as a great rational mechanism, but still quite enchanted, as it contained divine wisdom. In this sense, the best medicine was time, in contrast to what the “chemists” assumed, who considered the formulation of medicines to be the first option. Up to this point, Piquer is a classic author, resistant to the advent of modernity.

However, the Treatise has an explicitly “unsystematic” character, which means that it does not simply subordinate itself to the authoritative arguments of Galen, Hippocrates, and the Christian authorities, but rather pays close attention to observation and experience in constant dialogue with reason, understood here as the rationality inherent in the natural-divine order itself.

Piquer, responding to the ruptures associated with the new rationalist and empiricist currents, began to give greater importance to observation and experience, which had an impact on the way theory was produced. It would be anachronistic and fatalistic to assert that the Valencian physician was taking steps towards the consolidation of a positivist medicine, but the truth is that his work is situated at the crossroads and transition of epistemes.

Although he was sympathetic to the idea that the best cure is that provided by (God through) nature itself, he distinguished between acute and chronic diseases, the latter requiring the formulation of medicines understood as a way of accelerating nature's own healing process.

Although Piquer did not “discover” the essence of fevers, he did dare, based on controlled and repeated experience (experimentation), to formulate quinine powder for the treatment of tertian fever, which is associated with malaria. Furthermore, Piquer argued that, in the case of malaria, cinchona was not simply a medicine, but the only one (Frías, 2003).

Eamon argues that, with shifts such as Piquer's, there was a transition from an episteme centered on humors and natural balances, where cure involved a personalized lifestyle, to another episteme in which there is an abstract human body that is attacked by specific pathogens for which it is possible to find specific medicines.

The production of this human body, of course, involves experimentation understood as controlled and repeated experience. Thus, literally, quinine contributed to consolidating one of the main dimensions of modern man. The circle closes in 1820 and 1880, when, on the one hand, French pharmacists Pelletier and Caventou isolate quinine (the alkaloid contained in cinchona) and, on the other, a French military doctor discovers the parasite that causes malaria.

Malaria would no longer be the disease of bad air, from which its name derives. Nor would it have any further connection with an environment associated with natural imbalance, as indicated by its other name, paludism, since palus means wetland or swamp. From then on, it was known that malaria was caused by protozoa of the genus Plasmodium transmitted by female Anopheles mosquitoes, which reproduce parasitically through liver cells.

It is no coincidence that the circle closes in France, the land of the Enlightenment and human rights, but also of the consolidation of the knowledge and mechanisms of power that made the material emergence of Man himself possible. The old Jesuit confessor becomes a doctor capable of understanding the abstract human body when he treats each patient, and thus capable of formulating specific medicines for diseases with a precise etiology.

Through the administration of quinine, the bodies of French soldiers (and those of other imperial powers) became resistant to tropical malaria, which prompted a new wave of colonization, this time particularly modern and focused on Africa and certain areas of Asia and Oceania. Quinine was not transported by Man in his conquest of the world, but rather contributed to shaping Man and his concrete incarnations through devices such as the doctor.

Throughout this process, cinchona did not remain intact. It was extracted through capitalist plantation farming and reduced to its abstract chemical components, while non-Western epistemes and worlds were obliterated in order to give prominence to the enlightened, property-owning Man as the sole actor, author, and agent of history.

Molecular cinchona: in conclusion

In the mid-20th century, fierce inter-imperial confrontations were waged for the monopoly of quinine, as malaria became a weapon of war and cinchona itself a defensive weapon for soldiers. In fact, the National Socialist empire planned to use malaria as a biological weapon by building a bomb that would hypothetically spread anopheles mosquitoes. Fortunately, it did not succeed.

However, this story indicates that quinine itself, now in danger of extinction, has undergone a process of molecularization. We have gone from quino to quinine powder to quinine, the alkaloid, which is now isolated and synthesized in laboratories.

Malaria has gone from being a disease associated with the environment (air, swamps, etc.) to a disease with a specific etiology and, subsequently, an imperceptible microbiological weapon, which continues to act today, since, while the global North has eradicated the disease since the 1950s, the global South, which lacks abundant and effective medicines, still sees a considerable portion of its population die from this disease.

Finally, today we find quinine, the alkaloid, in beverages such as tonic water, sometimes combined with gin (gin and tonic), now not only to produce bodies capable of defending themselves against the disease, but also bodies of avid consumers without limits in the context of narco-pharmacological societies. The molarity of cinchona as a plant seems to have been left behind, reserved as cultural heritage or an unknown figure on Peru's national coat of arms.

The molecularization of cinchona, but also of malaria itself, confirms the hypothesis associated with Foucault's figuration of smallpox. Power now operates not only sovereignly and disciplinarily, but also molecularly: through the modeling and production of desires and means, the prediction of behaviors, and cybernetic intervention in technobiophysical-social information flows, where the individual and what distinguishes the human from the non-human is unclear. These are games that constantly redefine the boundaries between life and death, and between the living and the non-living. However, quinine and malaria, in contrast to Foucault's figurations, have the strength to show us the colonial edges that these dynamics entail, as well as the eventual worlds and epistemes obliterated by the narrative of the single agent.

In any case, this is happening in strange times, when the face of Man seems to be rapidly disintegrating and at the same time refusing to perish. Quina and malaria probably belong to a family of figurations yet to come, such as those proposed by the Karrabing collective (Povinelli, 2016): the Desert (with its imaginary of coal), the Animist (with its imaginary of the indigenous) and the Virus (with its imaginary of the terrorist). The history of quina is just beginning; it resists extinction.

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REFERENCES:

• Eamon, W. (2018). Corn, cochineal, and quina: The “Zilsel Thesis” in a colonial Iberian setting. Centaurus 60(3), pp. 141-158.
• Foucault, M. (2006). Seguridad, territorio, población: curso en el Collège de France (1977-1978). Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
• Frías, M. (2003). El discurso médico a propósito de las fiebres y de la quina en el Tratado de las Calenturas (1751) de Andrés Piquer. Asclepio 55(1), pp. 215-233.    
• Haraway, D. (2022). Visiones primates. Género, raza y naturaleza en la ciencia moderna. Buenos Aires: Hekht libros.
• Nieto, M. (2006). Remedios para el Imperio. Historia natural y la apropiación del nuevo mundo. Bogotá: Ediciones Uniandes.
• Povinelli, E. (2016). Geontologies: a requiem to late liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

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