cinchona

Noun

cinchona (countable and uncountable, plural cinchonas)

1. A tree or shrub of the genus Cinchona, native to the Andes in South America but since widely cultivated in Indonesia and India as well for its medicinal bark.
   • He seems to have collected plants of every kind - sugar-cane, coffee, cinchona, cocoa, indigo, and many others - and thus demonstrates beyond a doubt that Arnheim's Land will not prove herself behind the rest of the tropical world both in planting and agriculture, when the labour question is...1887, Harriet W. Daly, Digging, Squatting, and Pioneering Life in the Northern Territory of South Australia, page 222
   • German chemists were the first to isolate pure drug chemicals from herbal medicines, with the isolation of morphine from crude opium in 1803 and quinine from the bark of the cinchona tree in 1820.2001, Leslie Iversen, Drugs: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, page 8

   Synonyms:

   quinquina

2. The bark of these plants, which yield quinine and other alkaloids useful in reducing fevers and particularly in combatting malaria.

   Synonyms:

   cinchona bark, Jesuit's bark, Peruvian bark, quinine bark, quinquina

3. Any medicine chiefly composed of the prepared bark of these plants.