April 2026 Best Buys

Drugs When You Need ’Em Most

This is Porter & Co.’s Best Buys, which we publish on the fourth Saturday of the month. You can go here to see past Best Buys.

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If Oliver Cromwell had taken quinine, he’d likely have been alive at his own execution.

As it was, in 1661, he was put on trial for treason, hanged, beheaded, and had his head stuck on a spike on the roof of Westminster Hall... three years after he died from malaria.

Cromwell – a fanatic Protestant statesman – had overthrown and executed England’s Catholic-leaning King Charles I in 1649 and established a strict Protestant Republic, which he ruled with an iron fist (as “Lord Protector,” naturally, not as King).

Cromwell enjoyed absolute power until 1658, when a mosquito corrupted him absolutely.

Not that anyone knew it was a mosquito (carrying the deadly Plasmodium parasite). Malaria (Italian for bad air) had migrated to Europe from Africa via the slave trade in the late 16^th century, and no one could agree on what caused “fever and ague,” with theories ranging from foul weather to spiders.

What was certain was that it was fatal: the journal Nature estimates that 50 billion or 60 billion victims – about half of all the people in human history – have died from malaria’s one-two punch of violent chills and 107-degree fever. And – until the 1630s – there was no cure, unless you counted remedies like cat’s blood or ground wood chips.

Then a monk called Antonio de la Calancha discovered “Jesuit bark.”

De la Calancha ran a Catholic mission in the Andes and observed that the natives had their own treatment for fever: a tree with “bark of cinnamon color” that, when ground into powder, “cures the ague.”

This was the bark of the cinchona tree... a natural source of fever-suppressant quinine. Antonio and his fellow Jesuit monks tested the miraculous bark on patients in the mission, wrote up the results, and sent the powder, along with explanatory pamphlets, to pharmacists in Europe.

Results were mixed. The Catholics thought Jesuit bark was a brilliant remedy. And the Protestants – an increasingly large minority in Europe’s religious brawls – wanted nothing to do with it. Calling it the “Devil’s Dust,” they wrote it off as a papist plot to poison them. They’d rather die of the fever – and many of them did.

Oliver Cromwell was one of the casualties. Fanatic to the end, the Lord Protector refused quinine and died of severe malarial fever at age 59. But that was not quite the end of his story.

After Cromwell’s death, his shaky republic collapsed, and Charles II – King Charles’ son – returned from exile in France, eager to avenge his father. Cromwell – his father’s murderer – was, of course, dead and buried.

Undeterred, young King Charles hauled the corpse out of the vault, made a public spectacle of Cromwell’s posthumous treason trial, and impaled the Lord Protector’s head on a rooftop spike – where it would remain for another 20 years, until it blew off in a storm. The legends around Jesuit bark swirled for far longer.

A Bite Worse Than The Bark

Quinine gradually spread across Europe and made its way to America, but retained a lingering stigma, surrounded by a miasma of popishness and secrecy. Malaria, too, continued to spread – wherever there were crowds of people and bodies of standing water – and to strike slaves, popes, kings, presidents, and soldiers indiscriminately.

Quinine was the only remedy that worked – but it continued to suffer from bad PR.

Part of the problem was that, in an increasingly civilized society, no one wanted to grind up bad-tasting bark into powder. Enter “Dr.” Carl Warburg, who had no medical credentials that could be discovered, but was said to be “a very fine guitar player.” In between tarantellas, he developed a proprietary bottled quinine remedy with the powder pre-mixed into a liquid.

“Warburg’s Tincture,” as he named it, was disgusting. It was also, frankly, unserious.

Dr. Warburg flogged his nostrum throughout Europe and America from 1834 until 1875, and obstinately refused to reveal its ingredients. Chemists’ analyses showed that it was mainly quinine “concealed in a farrago of inert substances, for purposes of mystification.” It gained some notoriety – and also a persistent reputation as a quack remedy.

After spending all his money – and his ex-wife’s – on producing the medicine, Warburg gave in and released the secret ingredient list… with quinine at the top. A few years later, he died bankrupt.

Warburg’s Tincture left a generation of children better off, but with a bad taste in their mouths, which did nothing to fix quinine’s PR problem. That was up to a small three-man chemist company in Indianapolis, in 1876, one year after Warburg’s ingredient reveal.

The chemists at the company knew that quinine needed image rehabilitation, so they decided to create a pre-mixed quinine tincture that would go right where Warburg went wrong. They openly listed and advertised their ingredients, invited scrutiny and – perhaps most crucially – masked the bitter taste of quinine by mixing it into chocolate drops.

Chocolate quinine proved to be the golden ticket. Within the next three years, company sales had skyrocketed tenfold, and quinine candy was on drugstore shelves across the nation and then the world.

Over the next decades, quinine shed any remaining stigma and reached a fever pitch of demand, such that it started several supply-chain wars and ignited a new industry: synthetic quinine. (One of those synthetic products is hydroxychloroquine, which President Donald Trump recommended as a kind of Warburg’s Tincture cure-all for COVID.)

Today, the three-man chemist shop that cooked up chocolate quinine is a household name. Antonio de la Calancha, the monk who found Jesuit bark, and “Dr.” Warburg, who packaged it as a tonic? Not so much.

Which brings us to a hard truth: Quite often, history forgets the innovator. It remembers the mass marketer.

That chemist shop that added mass appeal to Jesuit bark has had a long history of improving on other people’s good ideas and getting them in front of a wider audience…

Quinine was just the first of these products – the company has followed the same strategy repeatedly over its 200-year existence (it definitely qualifies as a Lindy business) and is now an $800 billion biopharma behemoth. Today, we are adding it to the top of our Best Buys list because it’s just delivered a new, crowd-pleasing twist on an already successful medicine.