The Miraculous Fever-Tree goes on to chronicle the strategic cultivation and harvesting of cinchona in parts of the world to which its seeds were imported, including India. It follows the development of a widely marketable malaria remedy by entrepreneurs like Dr. John Sappington, who sold his own brand of fever pills. In the context of the book's other fine points, it is not surprising to learn that Sappington was also the great-great-great grandfather of Ginger Rogers.
Malaria currently kills one person every 15 seconds, according to a WHO statistic Rocco cites, and despite the development of synthetic remedies, quinine is still being used.
This book is filled with thumbnail sketches of many figures involved in scientific research. (Dr. Richard Spruce: "a tall north countryman who played the bagpipes, the soft-spoken bachelor was as renowned for his modesty as for his encyclopedic knowledge of mosses.") It is also full of increasingly grisly details as the investigation begins to involve mosquitoes as malaria carriers. "If I passed my hand across my face, I brought it away covered with blood and with the crushed bodies of gorged mosquitoes," Spruce wrote colorfully to a friend.
The most impressive scientist here, and the one who won a Nobel Prize in 1902 for research into mosquito-related matters, was Ronald Ross. His dissection of countless mosquito stomachs and thoraxes was instrumental in tracing a malaria-causing parasite to the mosquito's salivary gland. That kind of detail is life's blood to a book like this.
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