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Date or order number: 1600
Description: Quinine
Content: Following their arrival in the New World, Spanish Jesuit missionaries learned from indigenous Indian tribes of a medicinal bark used for the treatment of fevers. With this bark, the Countess of Chinchón, the wife of the Viceroy of Peru, was cured of her fever. The bark from the tree was then called Peruvian bark and the tree was named Cinchona after the countess. The medicine from the bark is now known as the antimalarial quinine. Along with artemisinins, quinine is one of the most effective antimalarial drugs available today. The cinchona tree as drawn by Theodor Zwinger, 1696 is shown here.

Date or order number: 1880
Description: Discovery of Plasmodium
Content: Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran, a French army surgeon stationed in Constantine, Algeria, was the first to notice parasites in the blood of a patient suffering from malaria. For his discovery, Laveran was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1907.

Date or order number: 1886
Description: Discovery of Multiple Species
Content: Camillo Golgi, an Italian neurophysiologist, established that there were at least two forms of the disease, one with tertian periodicity (fever every other day) and one with quartan periodicity (fever every third day). He also observed that the forms produced differing numbers of merozoites (new parasites) upon maturity and that fever coincided with the rupture and release of merozoites into the bloodstream. He was awarded a Nobel Prize in Medicine for his discoveries in 1906.

Date or order number: 1890
Description: Naming Plasmodium species
Content: The Italian investigators Giovanni Batista Grassi and Raimondo Filetti first introduced the names Plasmodium vivax and P. malariae for two of the malaria parasites that affect humans in 1890. Laveran had believed that there was only one species, Oscillaria malariae. An American, William H. Welch, reviewed the subject and, in 1897, he named the malignant tertian malaria parasite P. falciparum. In 1922, John William Watson Stephens described the fourth human malaria parasite, P. ovale. P. knowlesi was first described by Robert Knowles and Biraj Mohan Das Gupta in 1931 in a long-tailed macaque. The first documented human infection with P. knowlesi was in 1965.

Date or order number: 1898
Description: Discovery of Transmission by Anopheles
Content: Led by Giovanni Batista Grassi, a team of Italian investigators, which included Amico Bignami and Giuseppe Bastianelli, collected Anopheles claviger mosquitoes and allowed them to feed on malarial patients. They demonstrated the complete sporogonic cycle of Plasmodium falciparum, P. vivax, and P. malariae after these mosquitoes were subsequently demonstrated to harbor mature sporozoites. In 1899, mosquitoes infected by feeding on a patient in Rome were sent to London where they fed on two volunteers, both of whom developed malaria.

Date or order number: 1934
Description: Chloroquine
Content: Chloroquine was discovered by a German, Hans Andersag, in 1934 at Bayer I.G. Farbenindustrie A.G. laboratories in Eberfeld, Germany. He named his compound resochin. Through a series of lapses and confusion brought about during the war, chloroquine was finally recognized and established as an effective and safe antimalarial in 1946 by British and U.S. scientists.

Date or order number: 1939
Description: DDT (Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane)