The use of quinine during the Civil War.

  • Churchman, John W. (John Woolman), 1877-1937.
Date:
[1906]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The use of quinine during the Civil War. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    f'80] to this rule being the sale of the Bingham House, which brought him $1,000,000. The store of Darlington & Co. be- longed to him; whole blocks in Philadelphia were his; and his personal property tax return for 1903-1904 was over $5,000,- 000. Here we find, then, the resting place of the dollars that went for those 19 odd tons of quinine and of the many thousands of dollars that followed them when the monopoly established during the war lived on and grew fat. At the out- break of the war there were but two chemical houses in the country engaged in the manufacture of quinine from Peruvian bark. Powers & Weightman, and Eosengarten & Sons, both of Philadelphia. Previously the properties of the bark had been obtained by a process of suffusion; but these two firms, quickly introducing the method for separating quinine—in- vented by the French chemists, Pelletier and Coventon in 1820 —were soon without successful rivalry in the American manu- facture of the drug. And before long the price of the drug ($2.10 per ounce at the outbreak of the war) was, by reason of this monopoly aided by certain economic conditions, soaring heavenward. Alcohol, the essential solvent of quinine carried a heavy internal revenue tax; so that a duty was placed on imported quinine sulphate in order to allow the American drug to compete with that imported from Germany and other coun- tries where alcohol was free. The duty was 45 per cent; but the government, buying its quinine duty free, was able to avoid the monopoly of the American firms. Not, however, until large bills for the drug had been incurred. In New York alone nearly $591,000 were spent for quinine, $418,000 of this going to J. H. Eeed & Co., who were customers of Powers & Weightman; and the payments made to the latter firm themselves for drugs and medicines during the war amounted to over $231,000, of which a large share went for quinine. But, though the records of these transactions are, obviously, not complete in detail, the Confederates, too, were swelling the bank account of the northern Trust. The drug was contraband and had to be shipped South minus all mark- ings. Moreover Powers, the head of one firm, was a loyal and ardent Unionist; while Adolph Eosengarten, a member of the other, was killed at Murfreesboro after having risen to the