It was the missionaries of Spanish Colonial America who first observed the impact of fever tree had on malaria in local native people and this highlighted the value of plants as medicine to non-indigenous people.
For the past few decades, patients and the media have focused on the prescribed ‘wonder drugs’ that pour out of pharmaceutical research into prescription use. However, very little is heard of the research that is done on the plant life that is used to produce these synthetic products, nor of the botanists who have studied plant life, or where these herbs which have changed the face of medicine, such as cinchona from which quinine comes from. It is fascinating to follow the movement of natural products from their indigenous use to the pharmaceutical market.