Anti-Malarial Medicine Was An Accidental Find
Malaria isn’t a disease you want to get. Those mosquitoes are already annoying enough, but with an added risk of infection, they’re even scarier. Quinine is originally found in the bark of the cinchona tree. Now, it’s used as an anti-malarial compound. Humans contract malaria from mosquitoes infected with the virus. Symptoms include high fever, headaches, and body aches, and can become severe if the person doesn’t receive proper hydration.
The substance originally come from native Andean people. They taught Jesuit missionaries in South America how to use it in the 1600s. But the first person to discover it was an Andean man suffering from a fever. He was lost in the jungle and swallowed a pool of water at the base of a cinchona tree. It helped lessen his fever, and though the taste was bitter, he learned a valuable treatment (Interesting Engineering).