Most of the Catholic priests trained in Rome had seen malaria patients and were familiar with the shivering brought on by the febrile phase of the disease. The Jesuit Agostino Salumbrino (1564–1642), an apothecary by training who lived in Lima (now in present-day Peru), observed the Quechua using the bark of the cinchona tree to treat such shivering. While its effect in treating malaria (and malaria-induced shivering) was unrelated to its effect in controlling shivering from rigors, it was a successful medicine against malaria. At the first opportunity, Salumbrino sent a small quantity to Rome for testing as a malaria treatment. In the years that followed, cinchona bark, known as Jesuits bark or Peruvian bark, became one of the most valuable commodities shipped from Peru to Europe. When King Charles II was cured of malaria at the end of the 17th Century with quinine, it became popular in London. It remained the antimalarial drug of choice until the 1940s, when other drugs took over.The form of quinine most effective in treating malaria was found by Charles Marie de La Condamine in 1737. In 1820, French researchers Pierre Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Bienaimé Caventou first isolated quinine from the bark of a tree in the genus Cinchona – probably Cinchona pubescens – and subsequently named the substance. The name was derived from the original Quechua (Inca) word for the cinchona tree bark, quina or quina-quina, which means "bark of bark" or "holy bark".
Prior to 1820, the bark was dried, ground to a fine powder, and mixed into a liquid (commonly wine) in order to be drunk. Large-scale use of quinine as a malaria prophylaxis started around 1850. In 1853 Paul Briquet published a brief history and discussion of the literature on "quinquina".Quinine played a significant role in the colonization of Africa by Europeans. The availability of quinine for treatment had been said to be the prime reason Africa ceased to be known as the "white mans grave". A historian said, "it was quinines efficacy that gave colonists fresh opportunities to swarm into the Gold Coast, Nigeria and other parts of west Africa".To maintain their monopoly on cinchona bark, Peru and surrounding countries began outlawing the export of cinchona seeds and saplings in the early 19th century. In 1865, Manuel Incra Mamani collected seeds from a plant particularly high in quinine and provided them to Charles Ledger. Ledger sent them to his brother, who sold them to the Dutch government. Mamani was arrested on a seed collecting trip in 1871, and beaten so severely, likely because of providing the seeds to foreigners, that he died soon afterwards.By the late 19th century the Dutch grew the plants in Indonesian plantations. Soon they became the main suppliers of the tree. In 1913 they set up the Kina Bureau, a cartel of cinchona producers charged with controlling price and production. By the 1930s Dutch plantations in Java were producing 22 million pounds of cinchona bark, or 97% of the worlds quinine production.