Manual of Cinchona Cultivation in India.

Calcutta: Office of the Superintendant of Government Printing, 1876.

Price: $750.00


About the item

First. Plate. [ii], 80, 2, [2]pp. 1 vols. Folio. Original printed boards, slightly soiled, corners rubbed, preliminaries spotted. Drayton, Richard Harry; Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the Improvement of the world (2000), p.231.

Item #300039

King's important work on the manufacture of quinine has become increasingly scarce.

Quinine alkaloids and bark had become the standard treatment for malaria as early as 1825. However, methods of cultivation took were ruinous to the plants themselves and within 30 years demand for the bark (which only increased) was unable to be met. Forced to look abroad, cinchona plants - native to South America - were evenutally successfully cultivated in Travancore and Sikkim.

As superindentant of the Royal Botanical Garden at Calcutta George King played a pivotal role in this and had "urged his superiors that cinchonas benefits should be extended to reach all the population... By 1876 he organized the production of cheap febrifuge in Sikkim, out of crude extracts of cinchona, and its distribution through the Royal Mail's post offices in India in 5-pice packets (about one English farthing)" (Drayton). In 1887, he inaugurated "an economic method of separating quinine, and established in 1893 a self-supporting method of distributing the drug at a low price" (ODNB).