LYRICS: JOSÉ SORIANO PALAO 'THE CENTURY OF FEVERS'. MUNICIPAL ARCHIVE.

OLAPA AND PROMOTION

The aim of this book is to spread, without academic pretensions and with the necessary and possible simplicity, the discovery of quinine by the Spanish in the 16th century, the story of bringing it to Spain and Europe in the 17th century and of applying it to malaria sufferers in the 18th century, which was of enormous benefit to humanity for nearly 300 years. 
We Spaniards can feel very proud that it was a Spanish Augustinian father who observed that the bark of a Peruvian tree (cortex peruvianis), crushed and turned into powder (pulvere febrifugo occidentalis Indiae) ended shivering and cured feverish patients with tertian fever (current malaria or paludism) and that Spanish Jesuits confirmed this at the dean of the universities of America, that of San Marcos in Lima.
It is also true that the personal physician of the Viceroy of Peru, the Spaniard Juan de Vega, brought quinine to Seville, where another doctor, Gaspar Caldera de Heredia, began to use it with such success that he decided to write a book, the first in Europe, which dealt with the virtues of the drug that arrived from America.
Cabriada, Piquer, Alsinet, Masdevall, Salazar, are some of the names of Spanish doctors who administered quinine to their patients and recorded their experience in medical treatises that were disseminated throughout Europe in the 18th century, competing and collaborating with European professors such as Sydenham, Boerhaave, Van Swieten, Torti and many other pioneers, who began the path to achieve a drastic reduction in mortality from this terrible disease.
There is no doubt that the discovery of quinine constitutes a feat equivalent to the isolation and purification of insulin by the Canadians Banting and Best or that of penicillin by the British Fleming.

Jose Soriano Palao (Yecla, 1949)

Graduate in Medicine, Autonomous University of Barcelona, ​​1974
Doctor of Medicine and Surgery, University of Valencia, 1989
Graduate in Modern and Contemporary History, University of Murcia, 1995
Former Head of Internal Medicine Service at the Reina Sofía Hospital in Murcia. Retired in 2014.
Favorite Son of Yecla, 2014

He has published:
Healthcare and demographic change in Yecla: 1852-1930 (Royal Academy of Medicine and Surgery. Murcia, 2000), Keyword: Yecla in the national press, 1868-1936 (Diego Marín, Murcia, 2016), J. Martínez Ruiz “Azorín”. Anarchist writings. (La Fea Burguesía, Murcia, 2020), Healthcare in rural Spain. Yecla (Murcia) 1700-1850. Co-author with FJ Carpena (Tirano Banderas, Murcia, 2021), Medical care in Caudete in the 18th century. The Estruch manuscript. Co-author with FJ Carpena. (Tirano Banderas, Murcia, 2023).

PRESENTS ENRIQUE BERNAL MORRELL