Scholars often depict the early modern period as a moment of movement, connectivity, and boundary crossing. Within the histories of science, medicine, and technology, however, an emphasis on “specific circumstances and close, local settings”—in other words, locality—persists in the production of certain kinds of knowledge (2). By foregrounding cinchona, or Peruvian bark—one of the leading remedies and commodities of its day—A Singular Remedy suggests that both local and transoceanic processes contributed to a shared body of medical understandings, therapeutic practices, and imaginaries related to the bark’s consumption in this age of commerce.

A tree bark harvested from South America’s mountain forests, cinchona is now recognized to contain alkaloids (quinine among them) that interfere with malaria plasmodia in human red blood cells. Although they did not understand it in such terms at the time, Andean healers had used the bark for its febrifugal properties long before it entered the European...

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