This article addresses the discussion about quinine-resistant malaria plasmodium in the early decades of the twentieth century. Observed by Arthur Neiva in Rio de Janeiro in 1907, the biological and social resistance of malaria sufferers to preventive and curative treatment with quinine was corroborated three years later by Oswaldo Cruz during the construction of the Madeira-Mamoré Railway in the Brazilian Amazon. Likewise in 1910, ailing German workers were transferred from Brazil to Hamburg’s Institute for Maritime and Tropical Diseases, where quinine resistance was confirmed by Bernard Nocht and Heinrich Werner. When the First World War saw failures in treating and preventing malaria with quinine along with violent outbreaks of the disease on the Turkish and Balkan fronts, resistance to this alkaloid became the topic of the day within the field of experimental medicine in Germany. New attempts were made to account for the resistance, especially by the physician Ernst Rodenwaldt, who explored the topic by applying modern theories on heredity. The present article offers a preliminary survey and analysis of pronouncements about quinine resistance, shedding new light on the circulation of knowledge in the field of tropical medicine.

This article outlines the history of the commerce in medicinal plants and plant-based remedies from the Spanish American territories in the eighteenth century. It maps the routes used to transport the plants from Spanish America to Europe and, along the arteries of European commerce, colonialism and proselytism, into societies across the Americas, Asia and Africa. Inquiring into the causes of the global ‘spread’ of American remedies, it argues that medicinal plants like ipecacuanha, guaiacum, sarsaparilla, jalap root and cinchona moved with relative ease into Parisian medicine chests, Moroccan court pharmacies and Manila dispensaries alike, because of their ‘exotic’ charisma, the force of centuries-old medical habits, and the increasingly measurable effectiveness of many of these plants by the late eighteenth century. Ultimately and primarily, however, it was because the disease environments of these widely separated places, their medical systems and materia medica had long become entangled by the eighteenth century.