By Stefanie Gänger during her secondment at Musée vert
Amidst a total of 312.498, mostly local, zoological, botanical, and geological specimens, Le Mans’s Musée vert holds nine faded strips of tree bark classified as cinchona calisaya, a plant native to Andean South America. Most visitors would never notice crumbling pieces of tree bark, currently stored in a glass jar in the museum’s deposit, even if they were on public display. As a historian of science, collecting, and medicine with a lively interest in that substance and its variegated history, however, I could never walk past a cinchona sample without wanting to know more about it – its origins, its previous owners, and the story behind its movement into a collection, in this particular case, a French natural history museum that otherwise contained mostly specimens from the area.
According to the museum’s ledgers, which the institution’s director, Nicolas Morel, kindly shared with me, the bark samples were attained in the year 1932 (originally for the Musée de Tessé, the natural historical section of which later became the Musée vert). The cinchona samples apparently were part of a larger donation of twenty-eight specimens of ‘useful plants’ made that year, containing grains of castor and cacao pods from Madagascar, cannabis from Morocco, rubber from Soudan, and jute fibers from Indochina. The donor was a certain Marc Rondeau du Noyer, a Paris naturalist, zoologist, and entomologist. Apparently, Rondeau du Noyer had previously exhibited his collection of useful plants at the 1931 Paris International Colonial Exposition (Exposition Coloniale internationale) – a massive exhibition where as many as eight million visitors could have seen the bark samples. Rondeau du Noyer’s reasons for donating the collection to the Musée de Tessé (rather than a Paris Museum, as would have been customary) after the exhibition elude us, but they likely resulted from personal and family attachment to the city and region. Originally from the Le Mans area, Rondeau du Noyer was also cousin to Paul Delaunay, who at the time of the donation served as the Le Mans museum’s curator.
The link between the plant, cinchona, and France’s colonial past is evident. By the 1930s, the bark of cinchona trees had, for over a century, been employed as a source of natural alkaloids – quinine, especially – effective in the prophylaxis and treatment of febrile diseases, particularly malaria. Quinine had therefore long been a critical remedy to shield and cure the many French settlers, officials, and soldiers exposed to the fatal fevers of France’s African colonies, especially French Algeria (e.g., Fredj 2016). Unprocessed cinchona barks had been used medicinally for the cure of fevers, including those associated with ‘warm climates’, even longer, from the 1630s, as medicinal treatises and popular recipe collections reveal (see, for instance, Madame Maliverny’s eighteenth century cinchona and absinthe-based remedy for tertian and quartan fevers, preserved in her Livre des remedes’). The cinchona samples in question reached the museum shortly after, and perhaps on the occasion of, the Tercentenary of the bark’s first documented medicinal use by western Europeans.
According to the museum’s ledgers, the bark samples given by Rondeau du Noyer hailed from two different South American countries: Bolivia and Peru, a vague specification that may well suggest Rondeau du Noyer or whoever compiled the ledger, was uncertain about the samples’ precise origin. At any rate, it is not evident that by the 1930s cinchona samples should hail from these parts. Andean South America had long held a ‘natural’ monopoly on cinchona bark; from the seventeenth into the mid-nineteenth century, cinchona trees had prospered only on the precipitous eastern slopes of the Andes, in the Spanish American Viceroyalties of Peru and New Granada and later, their republican successor states. By 1932, however, Andean South America had for some time been a periphery of the trade in cinchona. From the mid-1800s, Dutch and British agents smuggled cinchona seedlings out of the Andes and created cinchona plantations in South and Southeast Asia that would undermine the South American monopoly on the bark. By the 1930s, the leading supplier of cinchona bark in the world were plantations in Java, in the Dutch Indies (Roersch van der Hoogte & Pieters, 2016). Rondeau du Noyer may have chosen South American samples either because of recent economic transformations – Bolivia, at least, was experiencing a resurgence of the bark industry in the period (Cuvi, 2011) – or, indeed, for historic reasons. For, the bark remained associated with Andean South America in the public imagination during the early 1930s, with romantic stories in general circulation of how the medicinal properties of cinchona bark had first come to the knowledge of mankind from the ‘the native Indians of Peru’ (see, for instance, Souvenir Cinchona tercentenary celebration and exhibition at the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum, 1930). Rondeau du Noyer’s choice of a South American specimen may well bear witness to the longevity of cultural images about that substance.
Unsurprisingly for anyone familiar with the history of the harvest and trade in cinchona, the identity of the South American collector of the Le Mans samples is ‘unknown’, according to the museum’s ledgers. From the outset of the bark trade in the seventeenth century into the first half of the twentieth century, the bark was harvested by ‘Indian’ men, cascarilleros, from the harvest areas or adjacent regions, who often spent weeks or months roaming through mountainous terrain in search of cinchona trees (e.g. Cuvi, 2011, Gänger, 2020). Even for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, our sources on their precise identity are limited to sales and recruitment lists and to prison records, a testament to how a system of advance payment and debt contracts caused many of them to lose their freedom (Gänger, 2020). The origins of our substance’s passage remain therefore elusive, as does the identity of its collector, or collectors. Still, it was from his, or their, hands that the bark samples would have set off on a lengthy journey: across the Atlantic, into the collection of Rondeau du Noyer, onto the Exposition Coloniale to theMusée de Tessé and eventually, up to the deposit of Le Mans’s Musée vert.

OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Nathalie Richard (July 10, 2023). Cinchona calisaya, Le Mans Musée vert. SciCoMove — Scientific Collections on the Move. Retrieved April 18, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/twuf