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LIVER feeling torpid? Nerves debilitated? Stomach weak? Do as the Victorians did and pour yourself a drop of the soft stuff: a tongue-tingling glass of tonic water. Best known today as one half of the ultimate English cocktail, it started out as a drink to revitalise the body and revive the spirits. Now, its sparkling story has been revealed, thanks to two tonic-tippling botanists.

On a blistering August afternoon – very definitely a gin-and-tonic sort of day – I headed to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew to meet Kim Walker and Mark Nesbitt. I soon found myself in the blissfully cool interior of a temperature-controlled storehouse. There, among Kew Gardens’ vast assemblage of botanical treasures, is the world’s largest collection of bark from cinchona trees, the source of tonic’s most vital ingredient: quinine. Rack after rack of floor-to-ceiling shelves hold a thousand bundles of bark along with bottles, packets and jars of cinchona seeds, powders and extracts.

Walker and Nesbitt have scoured this collection and Kew’s archives to trace the evolution of tonic water for their new book, . Both the taste and the fizz, it turns out, are rooted in medicine. It is a tale of discovery, adventure, imperial ambition and biopiracy, with a generous garnish of myth.

Cinchona trees are native to South America. There are 25 species (the 25th discovered only in 2013), all restricted to cloud forests strung along the eastern slopes of the Andes from Colombia to Chile. The trees’ bark contains dozens of bitter alkaloids, including quinine. In nature, quinine’s job is to deter hungry herbivores. In tonic, it provides the characteristic bitter flavour and refreshing astringency. But for almost 300 years, it was the only cure for malaria known in the West.

As befits a “miracle cure”, much of its story is unreliable. How, for instance, were the bark’s curative properties discovered? The oldest surviving written record of its use to treat malaria dates from 1633, long after the Spanish colonisation of South America. One tale claims it was discovered when feverish Jesuit priests recovered after drinking water from a lake containing fallen cinchona trees. But the fact that local people knew cinchona as the “fever tree” suggests that they had been using it long before the Spanish arrived, although not for malaria, which was unknown in the Andes. Travelling in Ecuador in the 18th century, French explorer Charles Marie de La Condamine wrote that the indigenous people there had cottoned on to its powers after watching mountain lions chewing its bark.

“It’s a tale of discovery, adventure, imperial ambition and biopiracy”

However it was discovered, before the 1630s were out, news of “the cure” and supplies of bark had reached Spain. Legend has it that in 1638, the Countess of ChinchÓn, wife of the Viceroy of Peru, was dying of fever – but was saved by the bark. Grateful, she sailed back to Spain to spread the word. More than a century later, the botanist Carl Linnaeus reinforced the story by naming the tree cinchona (his science being rather better than his spelling). The tale has been thoroughly debunked, yet persists even now.

It is more likely that Jesuit priests returning from South America introduced the cure to Europe. From the start, it was known as “Jesuit’s bark”, a name that saw the Protestant English and Dutch pooh-pooh it as a “popish fraud”. As it so obviously worked, they didn’t hold out too long, though. Supplies of the bark spread rapidly across Europe, where malaria remained a scourge of low-lying and marshy regions well into the 20th century. By 1677, Jesuit’s bark was listed in the London Pharmacopoeia as an “excellent thing against all sorts of agues”.

For two centuries, Europe imported cinchona bark from South America. The trade was highly destructive. “Unlike cinnamon, for example, local people would fell whole trees to harvest their bark,” says Alexandre Antonelli, Kew’s director of science and an expert on cinchona. In 1802, while travelling in Chile, German explorer Alexander von Humboldt noted how older, thicker trees had become scarce. “He was alarmed by the unsustainable harvest and the impact on Europe’s supplies,” says Antonelli.

He wasn’t alone. By the mid-19th century, demand for cinchona bark had soared, following the isolation of quinine and trials showing it to be an effective prophylactic against malaria as well as a cure. “Europeans wanted to control quality and quantity by growing cinchona in their own plantations in the tropical parts of their empires,” says Nesbitt. But Andean people were aware that if foreigners acquired the trees, their livelihoods were at risk, so getting hold of seeds and young plants required subterfuge. There was the prospect of arrest, or worse: in Peru, rumour had it that anyone caught stealing trees would have their feet chopped off. “But the political instability in the region made it a good time for biopiracy,” says Nesbitt.

Ill-gotten gains

Botanists and explorers did acquire seedlings and seeds, but all too often the young plants died and seeds grew into trees that produced little quinine. The amount of quinine varies from species to species, with concentrations ranging from 0.2 per cent to 13 per cent. “Collecting seed was a gamble,” says Walker. “It could be 10 years before you knew if your trees were useful.”

Half the bark samples at Kew come from the collections of John Eliot Howard, an English pharmacist and “quinologist” who spent his career trying to solve the riddle of which imported barks were best and where exactly they came from. “Howard had to do ‘reverse botany’, trying to connect a particular bark to a species of tree and a geographical origin so that collectors could target the best trees for cultivation,” says Walker. Many samples come with details of Howard’s chemical analyses attached. They were remarkably accurate, .

By the 1880s, British and Dutch plantations in India and Indonesia had destroyed the South American trade. It never recovered. Quinine remained the most important antimalarial drug until the 1940s, when synthetic alternatives became available. “Cinchona might have saved more human lives than any other plant,” says Antonelli. Quinine – extracted from bark – still has a role in medicine, treating leg cramps and rheumatoid arthritis. It is also used to treat malaria that is resistant to synthetic drugs.

So much for tonic water’s health-giving flavour, how about its other half – the refreshingly bubbly water? That, too, owes its origins to people’s never-ending quest for well-being.

Spa waters and mineral waters have an age-old reputation as health-boosting drinks. Their popularity skyrocketed in the 18th century when fizzy water made its debut, courtesy of English chemical whizz Joseph Priestley. In 1767, he invented a way to dissolve “fixed air” (carbon dioxide) in water to add sparkle – or the more delicious-sounding “bubbling scintillation”. Soon, aerated waters were being sold for disorders as varied as gout and indigestion and as a general panacea. Adding bicarbonate of soda helped dissolve more CO₂, creating the first soda water, which was soon available at all good pharmacies.

“With its reputation as a wonder drug, quinine made its way into all sorts of quack remedies”

All that remained to create tonic water was the addition of quinine. With its reputation as a wonder drug, it had already found its way into all sorts of quack remedies and “tonics”, drinks touted as treatments for everything from dysentery to smallpox, toothache to baldness, and as all-purpose restoratives. In Victorian times, tonic wines were the thing: the wine helped mask the bitter taste. They were suspiciously popular. Doctors feared they were a front for tippling and could lead to alcoholism. What better, then, than a pick-me-up without the alcohol?

In 1835, Hughes & Co, purveyors of “celebrated quinine pills”, corn plasters and French embrocation, advertised a new product: quinine soda water. It sank without trace. But in 1858, Erasmus Bond had more success, possibly thanks to a better choice of name: Pitt’s patent aerated tonic water. There it was: the word “tonic”, with its beguiling promise of better health. Other brands followed and although initially recommended as an aid to digestion, tonic water rapidly became known as a wholesome, refreshing drink. People, especially those in hot climates, quaffed it in quantity because they liked it. Some found it went rather well with a drop of gin (see “A very English cocktail”).

Tonic water is still inextricably linked to gin. When gin fell out of favour in the 1960s, sales of tonic plummeted. The reinvention of artisanal gin in the 21st century was quickly followed by the reinvention of its other half, with a new breed of flavoured tonic waters emerging. “And there’s a move away from alcohol,” says Nesbitt. “Tonic water is a great drink in itself. In fact, tonic without the gin is the original, historical drink.”