Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Same as Cinchona.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • any of several trees of the genus Cinchona. Same as cinchona.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun any of several trees of the genus Cinchona

Etymologies

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  • the tree bark that yields quinine, named for the countess of Chinchón, wife of viceroy of Peru. Legend has it that when this bark cured her 1638 fever, she had more collected for malaria sufferers.

    October 25, 2007

  • Wow, a 1638 fever sounds like a high one!

    ;)

    October 25, 2007

  • "Another medical man, Jose Celestino Mutis, left his native Spain in 1760 to go to South America as the private physician of the new viceroy of New Granada. Already fascinated by herbal medicine, Mutis made a study of chinchona, the source of the quinine that Amerindians used to treat fevers. Seeing the great scope for studying botany in the New World, he proposed a royal expedition to collect specimens. Although he had to wait two decades for its authorization, Mutis was able to spend the remaining twenty-five years of his life in an exploration of some 5,000 square miles encompassing tropical, plateau, and mountainous areas. When Alexander Humboldt visited him in Bogota in 1801, Mutis had thirty artists who had been working for years painting his twenty thousand specimens."

    --Joyce Appleby, Shores of Knowledge: New World Discoveries and the Scientific Imagination (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2013), p. 150

    December 28, 2016