I've just finished reading the book "El Dorado": the search for the legendary "Golden Man " or the mother lode of the South American gold that the Incas seemed to have in such abundance. And the plant hunters described in this current book actually covered much the same ground in the Andes and in Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Equador and Brazil. And the themes are similar: rain, mosquitos, heat, freezing cold, and terrible fevers and disease problems. The botanists don't seem to have had quite the same issues with headhunters and starvation as the Spanish gold seekers .......but they also seemed to be much more civilised. (The Spanish modus operandi was to live off the land......looting villages and taking slaves as bearers as they went). But certainly the fevers were a problem.
And I find this interesting because one of the themes of the current book is that the Americas were free of malaria and yellow fever prior to the arrival of Colombus. The theory is that Malaria was endemic in Seville and Barcelona .....the departure points for Colombus and that both malaria (different strains) and yellow fever were imported with African slaves. Sounds plausible ...certainly for the yellow fever: but both must have spread very rapidly in the Americas if it IS true. Columbus arrived in 1492. Cortez invaded Mexico in 1519 and Pizzaro was busy invading and conquering the Incas around 1529.....and they seemed to have been aided by the virulent spread of smallpox. Probably smallpox spread faster than the conquistadores.......certainly that's what happened with the European invasion of Australia. And if it happened with smallpox.......spread person to person...then, presumably, the fevers......spread by mosquitos (and infected hosts) could move even faster.
The gold seekers wasted no time and were active in the period from about 1530 (Nicolaus Federman in Venezuela)...to 1617 (Walter Raleigh in Orinoco). The Cichona plant seekers described in this book were active much later, in the 1800's ...and mostly in the period 1830-1860. The book is split fairly much between the activities of the plant explorers trying to smuggle live plants of cinchona out of South America and into plantations in India (British) and Indonesia (Dutch).
I was especially interested in the debunking of the famous story of the Viceroy's wife being saved by the infusion of the bark of the South American tree and then becoming a champion to introduce the cure into Europe. The fact that she was the Contessa de Chinchon gave the tree its European name. But, much to my confusion......and apparently many others....Linnaeus misspelled Chinchon and named the tree Cinchon. Actually, I have many very fond memories of great lunches with friends in the wine cuevas at Chinchon (which is not far from Madrid). And the town retains the almost medieval square and it's own castle. A lovely place.
Apparently the Jesuits introduced the bark to Europe in 1632 and it became known as the Jesuit's bark...and hence deprecated in protestant Britain....where people refused to use it. Clearly the genus is complicates with some botanists maintaining that there are 23 species and others that there are 15. The basic problem is that (apart from environmental differences which cause differences in growth habit) the plant does not self-fertilise and naturally hybridises. Hence the taxonomy is a mess and the medicinal quality/quantity of the quinine derived from the bark can vary greatly between species.
One of the things that fascinated me about the labours of the various botanists trying to collect cinchona and other new species of plants was the extraordinarily difficult circumstances under which they laboured and the number of collections (the result of years of work) that were lost to shipwreck or other disasters.
. La Condamine about 1742 lost a whole collection of cinchona saplings when a wave washed over his boat near the mouth of the Amazon after a journey from Mt Cajunama in the Andes....Probably about 3000km.
. Joseph de Jussieu spent years (from about 1737...at least until about 1743) collecting botanical specimens and experimenting with different species of cinchona. He entrusted his collection to a servant who disappeared with the lot and was never found.
. Hipolito Ruiz and Jose Pavon spent 7 years penetrating the forests of Peru and Chile collecting specimens; lost their journals and specimens (possibly a local collection) in a fire in 1786 but their main collection was in a ship that was wrecked off the coast of Portugal.
. Hugues Weddell in 1851 ..after 5 months of work danger and expenditure .. found most of his plants dead in the Wardian cases and sickly survivors that were unlikely to make it back to Europe,
. Richard Spruce 1859 after about a year's work in the Andes had 637 plants in Wardian cases. He was coming downriver from Lemon towards Guayaqui when the boat hit a mass of overhanging branches creating chaos but his cases survived.
. Clements Markham in 1860 took charge of Spruce's collection in 15 cases and another 6 for Pritchett's collection....a total of 450 plants. The original plan was for them to go straight to India from Panama but no such luck. They eventually went to India via Southampton (270 plants alive) then Egypt and Red Sea heat plus one case dropped into the sea. By the time they reached the hill station in India all plants were dead.
. Alfred Russell Wallace....after 4 years of work ....with his collection of natural history objects, skins, plants etc. sailed down the Amazon to Manaus and set sail for England in 1852. But 1,000 km from Bermuda his ship caught fire and all his collections were lost. How did these guys recover mentally from these sort of disasters?
Eventually, some of the specimens were grown successfully in plantations in Indonesia and India and elsewhere..and some of the pharmacology worked out ...though the English collectors and plantation managers slipped up with the most potent of the C. calisaya species and were growing a much less potent variety.
There is a big leap in the story then to the production of synthetic drugs for combatting malaria and more recently, molecular and DNA manipulation to develop vaccines.
One thing that the author makes clear is that the plasmodium causing malaria has a complex life cycle that makes it difficult to attack; it occurs in a range of different species and is transmitted by different species of mosquito. And every treatment has been thwarted by the ability of the plasmodium to develop resistance and morph it's genetic makeup. It truly is a tough nut for the medical establishment to crack. And malaria has been a hughe problem on battle fields where malaria has often killed more people than the soldier's guns.
I really enjoyed the book. Was going to give it 4 but on consideration, I give it 5 stars. ( )

(this review was originally written for bookslut)

The Fever Trail presents a fascinating story that, in my opinion, could have been better written. I was very excited when my review copy arrived in the mail. I had visited the book's website, which was very well done and it left me eager to read the book. The book promises to be the story of Richard Spruce, Charles Ledger, and Sir Clements Markham, three European men who journeyed to South America in attempts to bring back cinchona, the tree which produces quinine, a drug used to treat malaria -- however, the book is about much more than that. It starts with the South American expeditions, then rambles through the effects of malaria on various battles in military history, then finally ends up by talking about the current efforts to develop a malaria vaccine.

The story itself is very interesting, peopled as it is with so many under-appreciated heroes risking death in order to save the endangered cinchona tree and deliver a reliable source of quinine to the world. At the time during which most of the book is set, cinchona trees grow only high in the mountains of South America. Malaria, of course, is not so confined, being widespread throughout much of Africa, Europe, and Southern Asia. Once the Europeans arrived in the Americas, they introduced malaria to the Western hemisphere as well. Getting cinchona back to Europe not only meant surviving the mosquito-ridden Amazon (at a time when people didn't know that mosquitoes caused malaria, and so didn't take adequate steps to protect themselves), then the trek up into the Andes, and avoiding head-hunting natives, it also meant currying favor with the local governments, who had often outlawed the export of any cinchona plants or seeds. Wars, fires, and theft also had to be avoided. Then, of course, once the plants and seeds had been collected and put on a boat for export, there was the not at all trivial matter of transporting them across the Atlantic alive. The odds were not good. This is gripping stuff.

However many times Mark Honigsbaum's writing left me dreading picking the book up again. From the very beginning his writing style seemed rather random. He defined words whose meaning anyone with a dictionary could have discovered and that he might only have used once, but then phrases like "tertiary fever," which you can't just look up and which appear throughout the book were never explained. The pacing of the book was all over the place, and the jumps back and forth in time and the sheer number of important players in the book often left me baffled. The unfamiliar geography was also a challenge, and though there were maps at the front of the book, I don't recall them ever being referred to in the text, so they weren't nearly as helpful as they might have been.

Overall, I would not recommend this book to someone just looking for an enjoyable popular science book. If that's all you want, read Carl Sagan, or pick up a copy of And the Band Played On. But if you want to know more about malaria and the colonization of South America (as well as much of the Southern Hemisphere), this book is crammed with diverting tidbits and useful information. I do feel smarter for having read this book, and isn't that what we read non-fiction for? ( )

Fine account of the search for the cure of Malaria. Honigsbaum's work takes the reader through South America, Africa, and the South Pacific as well as Victorial London. Along the way, an understanding of the workings of malarial cycle becomes all too apparent. ( )

Malaria > History