Our world is a vegetal fact before it is an animal fact, yet one of the most important trees for humanity has been absent from our interest; as if its existence had no relevance, or had none today, or did not participate in the world, when nothing is more exposed to the world than a tree. Coccia (2017), whom I am following with my thoughts, denounces the relegated place that philosophy has given to plants and the ornamental use that biology has instilled in them, privileging the animal over the vegetable, when they embody the closest and most elemental link to the world. He asserts that this is not simply an epistemological inadequacy or a lack of attention, but rather contempt. As I read stories about the mysterious tree, look at scientific illustrations¹ of it, and think about the transformation of its plant matter, I have noticed one thing: in many of these stories and in some scientific practices, something is omitted, denied, or excluded. A part of reality has been discarded, and therefore these are mutilated stories or drawings. These omissions are not epistemological inadequacies or lapses in attention on the part of scientists, but rather correspond more to forgetfulness or failed acts originating in the unconscious defensive mechanism of repression. Disinterest, negligence, forgetfulness, or omissions involving plants are disturbances in consciousness that serve to avoid the discomfort caused by memory. In other words, they are mechanisms that allow us not to remember, since plants seem to remind us of painful or distressing events that we prefer to avoid.

In this article, I am interested in exploring some of the unconscious elements that may be determining these omissions from our conscious memory. To do this, I will gradually rediscover the history of this tree which, like all stories, is marked by complex human emotions, where classism and racism play a prominent role, and in which various fields of knowledge converge, including medicine, the arts, botany, literature, economics, and psychoanalysis. I will try to create connections as I present the story in order to fill in some gaps in my memory. Let's see.

I.

The tree is known by many names, as plants are called different things depending on their origin, characteristics, or similarities. It is known as Quina, Cascarilla, Tunita, Quina-quina, Ccarachucchu, Yara chucchu... It also has a scientific name assigned by Linnaeus: Cinchona officinalis, of the Rubiaceae family. It is a native forest species that flourishes especially in Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Colombia (Larreategui 2009).

Its importance lies in the fact that it has saved more lives than any other living being, as its bark contains quinine, an alkaloid that is very effective against malaria. This infectious disease is fatal if the patient does not have adequate defenses or drug treatment within 24 hours, and for hundreds of years it has caused millions of deaths among children, women, and men in different regions of the world. It is caused by parasites of the genus Plasmodium and transmitted by the females of several species of Anopheles mosquitoes. Most cases of infection in humans are due to the species P. falciparum and P. vivax.

Malaria was epidemic in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries and spread to, or already existed in, the Americas. As an effective remedy against malaria, the bark became highly sought after by Europeans, so much so that its trade reached enormous proportions. The natives of the Andean region knew of its healing power against fevers and chills. They macerated the bark until they obtained a fine powder that they mixed with a strong liquid to dissolve its bitter taste, or they prepared a drink with oranges, sugar, and water that they boiled, allowed to cool, and gave to the sick on an empty stomach. The preparation was important, but so was the dosage and administration.

The Jesuits, who arrived in Peru around 1568, learned of the tree's healing power from the natives and decided to take the bark to Europe. It is said that Francisca Enríquez, countess of the Chinchón region in Peru, was cured of malaria with a preparation made from the bark of this tree (Zevallos, 1989), thanks to the recommendation of Agustín Salumbrino, a Jesuit priest. The scientific name of the tree was then assigned a certain “royal” origin, a kind of official seal of originality that granted it entry into the taxonomic kingdom. Thus, the multiplicity of names, supposedly vulgar, was replaced by a single name that organized the multiple. Scientific taxonomy orders, classifies, and thereby reduces, replaces, and omits the plant's relationship with other living beings around it. The scientific name leaves out the context, denying the ancestral knowledge that the natives had of the tree and the multiple relationships that were established between them and the tree.

In the late 1620s and early 1630s, the bark was transported in boxes to the port of Cádiz, where it was tested to determine its “real” purity and define its commercial value. In 1647, the bark was already arriving in Rome, where the first official record of a medical prescription for Corticus peruvianus was signed by Domenico Anda, a Jesuit apothecary in charge of the Hospital of Santo Spirito, where they also invented a bark grinding machine to prepare the remedy.

The organic plant matter had to be reduced to something more easily exchangeable, and the healing properties of the tree hit the mark: it could be turned into a drug. To do this, the tree was stripped of its bark, as it was resistant to the rigors of trade. Didi-Huberman (2014) recalls that the bark of a tree is the impurity that comes from things themselves, pieces of its skin, an irregular, discontinuous, uneven skin. He also mentions the difference in the etymology of the word bark introduced by Latin. There are two types of bark: the epidermis or cortex, which refers to the outermost or liminal part of the body that can be torn off, cut or separated, and another for which the Latins invented the word líber, which is the part where the dermis adheres to the trunk and is used for writing. The word libro (book) is derived from líber, a thing made from surfaces extracted from trees where words and images are gathered. This makes me think that stories about trees always focus on their first bark, their epidermis detached from the trunk to be turned into dust. A first skin destined to die, but supremely useful for saving lives. But no one talks about the second bark, that exposed flesh that dripped its blood, its sap, its pain. It seems easier to think about the hard, dry epidermis, the one that can be cut, moved, and sold, than to talk about the trunk that is left dying, about that sensitive fragility that bears witness to the violence inflicted upon it. By omitting the second bark, we abandon fragility in the darkness of the forest, we leave behind the deepest pain. That which is mercilessly inflicted on our vulnerable bodies. We forget that this second bark is useful for writing, so we could think about the tree in question from that perspective. This means that we have to do something with suffering. Didi-Huberman invites us to be bark, to write with what falls from our flayed skin. A corporeal writing, of bark, of skin. Surely this creative exercise would be, like quinine, a very effective remedy against another evil.

II.

In Quinas amargas. The wise Mutis and the naturalist debate of the 18th century recounts how José Celestino Mutis arrived in Cartagena on the ship Castilla of King Charles III's navy in 1760, as he was the king's physician and responsible for his health. One of his main interests was finding remedies for diseases and solutions for the economy, as Spain needed new trade routes and greater independence. In 1783, the Royal Expedition to New Granada was approved, which was led by Mutis. He knew of the presence of cinchona trees in the mountains of Fusagasugá and Popayán, but it was necessary to verify whether these new Andean trees were the same as those in Peru or Ecuador, as their originality determined their purity and effectiveness as a drug.

The discord grew more prominent. Mutis, in order to defend his priority in the discovery of the tree, discredited López Ruiz, who apparently could have beaten him to the discovery of these trees. He requested a report from Panama on López Ruiz's ancestry and revealed that López Ruiz had black origins, something he had hidden, as many activities required proof of pure blood. The name given to the tree by a scientific authority was a seal of origin, but the name was also related to the purity of the discoverer's blood. Thus, the origin and credibility of the tree had to meet certain standards: the origin had to be real or noble, and the blood of its discoverer could not be contaminated—by black people. Such an exclusive and arrogant “origin.” Thus, we can see how elements of class and color, denoting cleanliness or whiteness—purity—became marks that determined whether or not bark was allowed into Europe and, therefore, whether or not it could be used as a medicine. Classism and racism are not absent from this story; rather, they are presented to us as defenses against what causes displeasure. Black had to be hidden or eliminated because it was impure. White, on the other hand, denoted a clean or pure Spanish origin. And it was not enough to define oneself as Spanish; one had to certify one's origin, undergo a blood test that was not visible, because that was where the hidden truth lay. The “discovery” of a tree, its name, the rules of exchange, were, and still are, imbued with this type of defense. Imperial mechanisms that institutionalize the exclusion of that which is disliked, which disturbs, which is different, which gets in the way of one's own interests.

Thanks to this certification, Mutis managed to set up a powerful bark collection company and send a first shipment of cinchona samples to Madrid in 1785. The Spanish crown held a monopoly on this trade in its viceroyalties through the Andean cinchona route, which ran from central Bolivia to the border between Colombia and Venezuela in the department of Norte de Santander (Crawford, 2016). The Spanish monopoly was weakened by competition from the English and Dutch colonies, which brought cinchona seeds and established extensive industrial crops, taking advantage of the abundant and undoubtedly cheap labor of the natives.

The tree's healing power against fever generated another fever, the commercial one. In Colombia, the bark was transported on canvas in leather-lined boxes along the Magdalena River from Honda to Barranca del Rey, and then shipped out of the port of Cartagena. The struggle between merchants intensified, and doubts about its purity became a central point of contention. Illegal trade became uncontrollable, and at one point, the arrival of cinchona from Bogotá was banned. In 1789, it was determined that the only cinchona that could enter Europe was that from Loja, as if it had not been adulterated. The business continued, even after the colonies declared independence and the Republic of Colombia was created. Mutis had sent samples of the cinchona bark to Humboldt and Bonpland, who discovered that this cinchona, the yellow cinchona (C. pubescens), did not match that of Loja and erroneously established its altitudinal distribution and geographical area. It seems that we have found another failed act that generated further confusion regarding the geographical distribution of the tree. Another issue where the color did not match. It is possible that racism also had something to do with this, that not all yellow cinchona trees are in a certain place or that red cinchona trees could be in very distant places. All of this had to do with the need to control or regulate trade and allow some cinchonas to pass while discarding others. It is interesting to think about how illegal trade does not differentiate between colors or respect classes, nor does it follow the same logic.

The exploitation of cinchona was intensive throughout the Andes until 1945, when Asian markets reopened and the use of synthetic antimalarials such as atebrine and chloroquine became established. However, resistance to these substances developed rapidly due to their frequent use, and quinine once again played a key role in the treatment of severe malaria.

III.

Another important element in this process of transforming the tree into a noble object, worthy of study, classification, and naming, is the drawing or illustration of the tree. For Europeans, it was necessary to identify the tree and understand its structure, but the tree was thousands of miles away. It was not enough to have pieces of bark, seeds, or leaves to know it, and transporting it was impossible, as it was organic matter that decomposed. With all this, the tree, in order to be known, had to be reduced to an image. There is a strange realism in the drawings. Although they manage to capture great detail in the branches, leaves, stem, and flowers, the tree appears detached from its context, from its earthly anchor, deterritorialized. Drawing implied the imposition of something; it determined a world, a violent gaze, as it imposed a cut, leaving out the lower part of the tree, its roots, and with them, the earth, which is generally dark in color and associated with dirt. We can therefore think that the image also sought to order and clean up reality. Here, the multiple connections that trees establish through their roots with geological layers and so many other forms of existence—fungi, insects, microorganisms, mosses—were omitted. It is interesting to bear in mind that these omitted connections are reticular, they do not follow a teleological logic, they do not imply a linear and progressive temporality, but are like a network, a rhizome, something that grows in all directions, as its movement is reticular. Roots, like the unconscious, are enigmatic forms, remaining in darkness, in the depths, and are infinitely more complex than what we perceive in consciousness. Their functions cannot be designated in a univocal way; they need to enter into relationship with other organisms, they also sustain the plant, they have the function of feeding it, and they relate to brains because it is through the roots that the plant acquires most of the information it needs and comes into contact with others. Roots, like the unconscious, are not representable; they cannot be drawn because the connections they establish are multiple and do not follow a formal logic. By omitting the roots in the drawing, the gaze that is imposed defends itself from the anxiety produced by the multiple connections in all directions, where the dirty, the impure, and the pleasurable are indeterminate.

IV.

Thanks to the healing properties of its bark, cinchona became a commodity of the Spanish empire. This transformation was a long and deeply violent process that involved deterritorialization, the extraction of life, but also multiple omissions and acts of forgetting, in which unpleasant emotions played a central role. The assignment of the scientific name and scientific illustration turned out to be concrete practices of appropriation, strategies to create a specific world with a specific order, but to do so, the tree had to be reduced to something else, omitting elements that were unpleasant to remember. With the scientific name, the multiplicity of names for the tree was reduced to one that ensured a specific type of ancestry: a noble and pure origin. The scientific illustration of the tree achieved an abstraction in which the tree was exposed as a clean and beautiful object, worthy of study.

Attempting an immersion exercise such as the one described by Coccia (2017) or establishing a deeper relationship than consciousness with a tree implies recognizing that nothing escapes the repression of unconscious elements that distress human beings. Hence the omissions or failed acts of science, symptoms that reveal how we defend ourselves from elements of sexuality: the dirty, the vulgar, the impure, the disordered or rhizomatic, the wild, the excessive, the black... in other words, from the unconscious drive.

The plant world also distresses us with its particular present, its immobility, its irregular and discontinuous skin. We are incapable of understanding the extensive adhesion that plants have to the earth, or their intimate relationship with air and light, and even less so their immersion in the atmosphere. Compared to that of a tree, our uprootedness is surely brutal and unbearable. Plants cause us great narcissistic wounds, because our ability to adhere, extend, and create a world is not as vital as theirs. Our ties or connections to other forms of existence are not as direct or indissoluble; on the contrary, we are making them increasingly ephemeral and insignificant.

V.

The cinchona tree also allows us to think about the vital possibility of resisting the blows of reality, which are always violent. Next to it, we know that, despite all our scars, we have the libidinal capacity to create new skin with which we can make new connections, an exercise that involves touching and allowing ourselves to be touched by the suffering of others. With this in mind, I would like to end this piece with a brief account of the beginning of a psychoanalytic session with a patient, as it helps us to weigh up the profound meaning that plants have for us.

L. lies down on the couch and begins to speak: "Every day we sit with my dad to have our morning coffee in the courtyard of the house. Today, I was struck by the Bugambil, that scary tree. If you're not careful, it will eat you! It grows so much that you have to prune it all the time, otherwise it gets out of control, grows wherever it wants, and spreads branches everywhere. So you have to keep cutting it back, and you never get to see the flowers. My mom really liked that tree. She also liked the lily. We have a lily in the yard. It doesn't grow very tall and blooms from time to time, and when it does, its flowers are beautiful, although they don't last long. That lily reminds me most of my mom. She also liked myrtle, I'm not sure why. No one planted one in the yard, but one day one appeared. I'm sure a bird brought the seed. My mom was very happy when she saw that myrtle in a corner between some bricks. That little stick was there until Don Alirio, who is a stubborn old man, decided to cut it down, because he always does what he wants, not what you tell him to do. One condition my mom gave my dad to marry her was that the house where she lived had to have a brevo tree. It's funny, I don't like the brevo that much, I don't know, maybe it's because it doesn't bloom, the fruit comes out of the leaf! Maybe that's why it doesn't catch my attention, I don't know, I'm going to inspect it closely to see what it's like. She liked ripe figs and fought with the swallows because they beat her to them and ate them first. What a tree for figs! My mom really liked bushes. My dad was implicitly in charge of paying the gardener, but she was the one who decided what to do in the yard. Now that she's gone, he's the one who takes care of all the bushes, but he's trendy. First, he got into succulents, which are easy to grow, so he had a lot of them, everywhere! Now he's into anthuriums. He has them in every color and hired a man to make him some little gardens. I like plants, but I just look at them. I don't even water them. I don't know why I don't get very close to them. But now I'm going to take care of the front garden. I made a deal with my dad, and I told the new gardener to cut the bugambilia really low, and he said no, but I insisted that he cut it, because that's the only way we'll ever see the flowers, and he had to listen to me! He cut it short and now it's sprouting again. It looks nice, and I'm sure it will be beautiful in December, just like my mom liked to see it. I feel like she's still alive in the plants. She's there. I feel her in those trees."

Plants seem to give us a new skin to endure suffering, even the terrible wounds caused by the death of loved ones, especially the loss of a mother. The deep connections they allow us to form are wonderful because they transcend life itself. L.'s mother, who died a few years ago, left a very painful wound in her, yet she feels her mother is alive in another way. This feeling comes through her affection for the plants in her garden. Her beautiful, powerful mother, who told her what to do, didn't move much from her house, just like a plant. She had a fixed place, but at times she also grew too much and overwhelmed L. She was also all-consuming. Now that her mother is gone, her father is the one who waters the plants, feeds them, and cares for them. Unlike her mother, he is more ethereal, moving around a lot, coming and going, disappearing easily. The movement of plants is strange; sometimes it is imperceptible, and other times we feel overwhelmed by them. The creeping of their branches and roots in all directions makes us feel a certain urgency, as if something about their growth disturbs us. L. ends by saying: “I'm going to talk to the gardener so he can prune those bushes in the front yard and they don't grow where they shouldn't. Plants need to be given a place, they can't always grow wherever they please.”

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NOTES:

1. Volume 44 of the Flora of the Royal Botanical Expedition of the New Kingdom of Granada includes studies on cinchona trees, conducted under the direction of José Celestino Mutis and sponsored by King Charles III. To see some illustrations of cinchona, consult the catalog of the National Library of Colombia.

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REFERENCES:

• Coccia, E. (2017). La vida de las plantas. Una metafísica de la mixtura. Trad. Gabriela Milone. Editorial Miño y Dávila: Buenos Aires.
• Díaz Piedrahita, S. Las quinas en el mundo y en Colombia. Revista MEDICINA - Vol. 25 No. 2 (62) - agosto 2003.
• Didi-Huberman, G. (2014). Cortezas. trad. cast. de Mariel Manrique y Hernán Marturet. Santander: Shangrila.
• Giraldo, E. (2022). Sumario de plantas oficiosas. Luna Libros: Bogotá
• Jaramillo, A. J. (1951). "Estudio crítico acerca de los hechos básicos en la historia de la quina". Revista de la Academia Colombiana de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales, 30: 61-128.
• Larreategui, D. (2009). Historia del árbol de la quina en Ecuador. (en línea, sitio web). Disponible aquí.
• Nieto, M. (2019). Remedios para el Imperio. Historia natural y la apropiación del nuevo mundo. Edición Uniandes: Bogotá.
• Zevallos, P. (1989). Taxonomía, distribución geográfica y estatus del género Cinchona en el Perú. Lima, Perú, Universidad Nacional Agraria La Molina. p. 64.

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