Page 231 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

1532 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the
point is to discover them. • Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)

shrewdness and prodigious capacity for work.The strictly
centralized system, in fact, required an exceptional ruler, Quinine
and lacking traditional legitimacy or popular support,
it rapidly collapsed. In the West, the most lasting legacy uinine, the great antimalarial medicine, was the first
of the short-lived Qin dynasty is its name: Qin (in Qdisease-specific medicine in the Western medical
Wade-Giles romanization, Ch’in), pronounced in English arsenal. Unlike earlier medicines that only masked or
“chin”—the origin of the English name China. relieved the symptoms of medical complaint, quinine was
In China, lurid stories about the rise and fall of Qin Shi capable of bringing about either a temporary or perma-
Huang and his empire continue to captivate the popular nent cure, depending on the type of malarial infection.
imagination, as shown in the recent movie (released in It was widely employed in western Europe and North
North America with English subtitles) The Emperor and America for generations before the germ theory of dis-
the Assassin, 2001, directed by Chen Kaige. Much of this ease. In the nineteenth century it was the principal line of
lore is based on the account by the official Han dynasty defense against the major public health threat in the
historian, Sima Qian (c. 145–c. 86 BCE), which was not United States and parts of Europe.
only written over a century later but also reflects pro-Han, In 1820 the French chemists Pierre-Joseph Pelletier and
pro-Confucian sentiments.The historical Qin Shi Huang Jean-Bienaimé Caventou isolated two alkaloids from the
may or may not have been as cruel, paranoid, and arro- bark of the cinchona tree. They named the white crystal
gant as he is depicted. However, one indisputable piece quinine and the brown liquid cinchonine.These and other
of physical evidence attests to the grandiosity of his successful laboratory experiments by Pelletier and Caven-
ambitions. In the 1970s construction workers near the tou mark the beginning of modern alkaloidal chemistry.
modern city of Xi’an discovered enormous underground In the course of the 1820s, chemical manufacturing
chambers with thousands of life-sized statues of soldiers firms sprang up in the U.S., the Netherlands, Great
and horses. This terra-cotta army, left to guard the First Britain, France, and Prussia to produce quinine and cin-
Emperor forever, has become a national monument and chonine. Cinchonine became known as the “poor man’s
first-class tourist attraction.The emperor waits nearby, his quinine”; it sold at a fraction of the price of quinine and
tomb encased in an artificial mountain.When it is exca- became part of patent medicine formulations. Quinine
vated, Qin Shi Huang will probably achieve even more gained an international reputation as the effective cure for
historical celebrity—or notoriety. malaria, and the high demand for it yielded robust prof-
its. Many of today’s major international pharmaceutical
Ralph C. Croizier
corporations have roots in the quinine industry.
See also China Most early consumers were in the U.S. and in western
Europe, where malaria was one of the principal public
health problems of the nineteenth century. Through the
Further Reading
course of European colonial expansion and experience
Bodde, D. (1938). China’s first unifier: A study of the Ch’in dynasty as
seen in the life of Li Ssu. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill. with the disease environment on the African coasts,
Cottrell, L. (1981). The first emperor of China. London: Penguin. malaria eventually came to be understood as a global dis-
Twitchett, D., & Loewe, M. (Eds.). (1986). The Cambridge history of ease. Quinine was extremely portable, and from the mid-
China:Vol 1.The Ch’in and Han empire. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press. dle of the nineteenth century onward it was regularly
Wills, J. E. (1994). Mountain of fame: Portraits in Chinese history. Prince- taken as a prophylaxis, allowing European explorers, mis-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Yu-ning, L. (Ed.). (1975). The first emperor of China: The politics of his- sionaries, and troops to carry out their activities in areas
toriography. White Plains, NY: International Arts and Sciences Press. where malaria was endemic. In India, the British learned