(Carapichea Ipecacuanha (Brot.) L. Andersson): Plants for Medicinal Use from the 16Th Century to the Present
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journal of herbal medicine 2 (2012) 103–112 Available online at www.sciencedirect.com journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/hermed Review Use and importance of quina (Cinchona spp.) and ipeca (Carapichea ipecacuanha (Brot.) L. Andersson): Plants for medicinal use from the 16th century to the present Washington Soares Ferreira Júnior ∗, Margarita Paloma Cruz, Lucilene Lima dos Santos, Maria Franco Trindade Medeiros Laboratory of Applied Ethnobotany, Department of Biology, Federal Rural University of Pernambuco, Av. Dom Manoel de Medeiros, s/n, Dois Irmãos, CEP: 52171-900, Recife, PE, Brazil article info abstract Article history: Observations in prescriptions of the monasteries’ apothecaries of São Bento from Rio de Received 1 February 2012 Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro) and Olinda (Pernambuco) dating from the nineteenth century, Received in revised form prescribed quina (Cinchona spp., Rubiaceae) and ipeca (Carapichea ipecacuanha [Brot.] L. Ander- 30 May 2012 sson, Rubiaceae) for antidiarrheal/febrifuge and emetic/expectorant uses. In addition to Accepted 30 July 2012 these observations, pharmacological and anthropological literature indicate a great impor- Available online 4 October 2012 tance of using these plants for treating human diseases since ancient times. From this information, the present work conducts a literature review to investigate the history of dis- Keywords: covery and use of these species, recovering information about past and current uses of quina Historical ethnobotany and ipeca, seeking also to record possible changes in usage over time. Rubiaceae © 2012 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved. Past pharmacopoeias Contents 1. Introduction .................................................................................................................. 104 2. Methodology ................................................................................................................. 104 3. The genus Cinchona .......................................................................................................... 104 3.1. Taxonomic aspects and geographical distribution .................................................................. 104 3.2. Historical remarks .................................................................................................... 106 3.2.1. How indigenous people and Europeans knew about the uses and applications of quina ................ 106 3.2.2. Records prior to the seventeenth century on Cinchona use................................................. 106 3.2.3. The role of naturalists in the description of the genus and species of Cinchona .......................... 106 3.2.4. Plantations and commercial activity ........................................................................ 107 3.2.5. Use of Cinchona from the twentieth century ................................................................ 107 4. The case of Carapichea ipecacuanha (Brot.) L. Andersson .................................................................... 108 ∗ Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (W.S. Ferreira Júnior). 2210-8033/$ – see front matter © 2012 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.hermed.2012.07.003 104 journal of herbal medicine 2 (2012) 103–112 4.1. Taxonomic aspects and geographical distribution of the species .................................................. 108 4.2. Historical Remarks .................................................................................................... 110 4.2.1. How Europeans came to use ipeca .......................................................................... 110 4.2.2. Past and present use of C. ipecacuanha ...................................................................... 110 5. Final considerations: linking information on the historical use of Cinchona spp. and Carapichea ipecacuanha ........... 110 Acknowledgment ............................................................................................................ 111 References .................................................................................................................... 111 1. Introduction 2. Methodology The use of plants for disease treatment in tropical regions is This study was conducted through a comprehensive, sys- widespread, and the use of these plants has been documented tematic literature search regarding the use of plants of the from the times that people in the old world met the indige- genus Cinchona and C. ipecacuanha for medicinal purposes. nous American people (Ortiz Crespo, 1994). In South America, Empirical searches were conducted via the databases JSTOR there is an interest in the use of the Rubiaceae species, popu- (http://www.jstor.org), Scopus (http://www.scopus.com) and larly known as quina or cinchona (Cinchona spp.) (Kurian and Scirus (http://www.scirus.com) as well as periodicals using the Sankar, 2007) and ipeca or ipecacuanha (Carapichea ipecacuanha following four keyword combinations: Cinchona and medic- (Brot.) L. Andersson) (De Boer and Thulin, 2005). These plants inal; Cinchona and ethnobotany; Ipecacuanha and medicinal are extremely important in history, and have been used by and Ipecacuanha and ethnobotany. Publications were consid- many groups of people, both natives and settlers (Möller et al., ered up to the end of 2010. Information on the history of the 2007). For example, authors from several regions throughout knowledge and use of these plants was also recorded after history have reported the importance of Cinchona spp. and consulting the collections from the following Brazilian insti- Carapichea ipecacuanha for disease treatment (Sandwith et al., tutions: the National Library of Rio de Janeiro; the National 1914; Kurian and Sankar, 2007; Alencar et al., 2010; Medeiros Museum Library; the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and et al., 2010). the Library of the Institute of Botany of the Rio de Janeiro According to Medeiros et al. (2010) and Medeiros and Botanical Garden. All of the information regarding the plants; Albuquerque (2012), nineteenth-century prescriptions from their past and present therapeutic uses; the part of the plant chemists and pharmacies in the monasteries of São Bento that was used and data about planting and marketing was from Rio de Janeiro (State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) and taken directly from the selected papers. Both in vitro and Olinda (Pernambuco, Brazil) described quina as an anti- in vivo pharmacological studies in humans and animals for diarrheal and febrifuge and ipecac as an emetic and each plant species were considered. expectorant. Historically, these plants were initially used Data regarding the botanical aspects and geographical dis- by indigenous populations, and have since been used in tribution of the plants was also extracted. Europe and other parts of the world (Sandwith et al., The taxonomic update was performed by consulting an 1914; Ortiz Crespo, 1994); therefore, there has been sub- expert botanist, Regina Helena Potsch Andreta, Santa Ursula stantial overuse of these species throughout time (Assis University, Brazil and the Missouri Botanical Garden database and Giulietti, 1999) from pharmaceutical companies (Brandão (http://www.tropicos.org/). To describe the quina and ipeca et al., 2008). plants, illustrations from a reference work entitled “Flora Despite the fact that quina and ipecac have been used do Brasil” were also included (Argoviensis and Schumann, as medicinal plants throughout history, there is a lack of 1889a,b). information on these species and a detailed analysis that The results in this paper are divided into two sections, one describes their use over time. Thus, the purpose of this for Cinchona and one for C. ipecacuanha. For each plant general paper is to provide a detailed historical documentation of the information about the species, historical considerations about use of these two plants based on the observations made by their medicinal use since the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- Medeiros et al. (2010) and Medeiros and Albuquerque (2012) turies, data from the initial written records of their use, as well related to their important participation in the nineteenth- as the present pharmacological properties of the species are century Brazilian pharmacopoeia, particularly from 1837 to reported. 1839, the 1840s, 1860s and 1880s, which is the time when the Rio de Janeiro monastery source was written, and the period from 1823 to 1829, when the Olinda monastery source 3. The genus Cinchona was written. This work seeks to conduct a literature review to document the history of the discovery and use of these 3.1. Taxonomic aspects and geographical distribution plants by accessing their ancient as well as their contempo- rary uses and to understand the reasons why these plants The genus Cinchona (Fig. 1) is composed of a shrub or small tree were and still are considered important for disease treat- species, reaching up to 20 m high with a diameter between 15 ment. and 20 cm. It has a natural distribution, extending from the journal of herbal medicine 2 (2012) 103–112 105 Fig. 1 – Board representing the species Cinchona carabayensis Wedd. in Flora Brasiliensis (1840–1906). Source: Flora Brasiliensis Online: http://florabrasiliensis.cria.org.br. mountains of Southern Costa Rica and Northern Panama, to According to Kirkbride (1982), Carl F. Linnaeus established the Andean mountains of Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and the genus Cinchona in the second edition of his work entitled Peru, to Bolivia (Andersson, 1998).