Show THE VALUE OF QUlfr NB vhr It le tied On KxleniUeljr The Llvee It Hat Unveil Quinine is ono of the most valuable of nil the drugs known to medical science No one would venture to travel In India without it Before Its discovery discov-ery two million people died annually I I In India of malarial fever The mortality mortal-ity from this cause Is now less than halt that number The poor people so poor that they looked upon the fever as their fate and expected no relief are saved by the agency of quinine Livingstone and other travelers in Central Africa could never have made their discoveries without its aid It is said of the great German explorer Schwclnfurth that when he lost his entire property by fire valuable scientific sci-entific Instruments among the rest he felt the loss of his quinine to be the greatest of all and often thought with fear of the Journeys that Iny befjre him which however he persevered infine The soldiers In the American Civil War depended greatly upon quinine The pioneers in this country when It was first settled and civilized had as hard work lighting fever and ague In the then swampy malarial districts as in fighting Indians nnd quinine was even more necessary than firearms The great Interoconn canal now in process of construction across the Isthmus Isth-mus of Panama requires the labor of thousands of men largely unused to the climate and so much the more susceptible to its ill effect Before the route was decided upon mnny surveys were made and the men naval officers and others engaged in this work were exposed to all conditions of weather But through the universal and proper use of the medicine dnlly ns a precautionary precau-tionary measure the mortality was no greater than among men in like employ em-ploy in other localities Out of a little more than six thousand white men employed In the construction of the Panama Itallrond there were only 203 deaths nndsome of these were the result re-sult of other than climatic causes The whole world Is indebted to the chlnchonn tree from which quinine Is made Who could have foretold that this tree a native of the mountainous forests of South America would be of such Importance lu the advance of civilization civ-ilization and Chrlstlnnlty Its sat transportation from one side of the world to the other and tho success suc-cess attained in converting a wild into a cultivated plant and naturalizing naturaliz-ing it reads like a romance One of the strange things about quinine is that It is not used as n medicine In the practice of the native physicians of Peru Ecuador or Colombia The native Indians did not even know of its curative property till enlightened en-lightened by tho Spaniards about 250 years ago They called the chlnchona tree kina from which comes the word quinine What lot of names the drug has hnd China bark quinn quin quina chlnchonn baric quinine cln cona countess powder Jesuits bark Cardinal do Lugos powder Peruvian bark etc Great fortunes have been made out of it At one time when Louis XIV purchased tho secret a pound of the bark cost about s50 As it came Into genernl use It became a most important impor-tant nrtloln of exnort from Peru Now it is successfully cultivated In Ceylon and Java As a means of guarding the system from intermittent fever the English naval regulations require that everyman every-man shall take a portion of the drug I when n ship Is within a certain distance i dis-tance of the east or west coast of i Africa and that It shr l be regularly taken by those engaged in boat cruising cruis-ing along the coasts or on the rivers or creeks Wo say with as much truth now as did Lambert in 1820 The treasures which Peru yields and which the Span lards sought and dug out of the bowels of the earth are not to be compared for utility with the hark of tho quin quina tree which they for n longtime long-time ignored Chlcngo Chronicle |