Jesuits' powder and quinine

Father Antonio de la Calancha, a Jesuit priest living in 17th century South America wrote in the Chronicle of St Augustine  in 1633 of a 'tree which they call "the fever tree" whose bark made into a powder amounting to the weight of two small silver coins and given as a beverage, cures the fevers and the tertians'. (Tertians was the name for the three-day cycle of one form of malarial fever.) The Inca name for this tree was  quina  but there is no evidence that they recognised its value for the treatment of malaria, but simply for its ability to prevent cold-induced shivering. It was the Jesuit missionaries who first used the powdered tree bark for treating malaria and so it became known as Jesuits' powder. Cardinal Juan de Lugo pioneered its use in the middle of the 17th century in Rome at a time when Rome was surrounded by marshland where malaria was endemic.