The willow as a Hottentot (Khoikhoi) remedy for rheumatic fever

In 1764, Edmund Stone, a vicar in Chipping Norton, a small town in North Oxfordshire, England, reasoned that the bark of the common white willow tree (Salix alba vulgaris) might be a treatment for 'agues and intermitting disorders' (fevers): 1 'About six years ago, I accidentally tasted it, and was surprised by its extraordinary bitterness; which immediately raised me a suspicion of its having the properties of Peruvian bark. As this tree delights in a moist or wet soil, where agues chiefly abound, the general maxim, that many natural maladies carry their cures along with them, or that their remedies lie not far from their causes, was so very apposite to this particular case, that I could not help applying it; and that this might be the intention of Providence here, I must own had some little weight with me.' In an account published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Stone reported that over the previous five years he had treated 50 cases of fever with willow bark, 'which never failed in the cure, except in a few autumnal and quartan agues'. 1 Edmund Stone's experience was not mentioned when more than a hundred years later, Thomas Maclagan, a doctor in Dundee, Scotland, reported on his use of salicin to treat the symptoms of rheumatic fever. 2 His reasoning was remarkably similar to Stone's: 'Rheumatic fever is now generally regarded as being produced by some cause or agency which is generated within the body. My own investigations into its pathology have led me to reject this view, and to adopt the old " miasmatic " view of its mode of origin, according to which the cause which gives rise to the disease is introduced into the system from without. Holding this view as to the pathology of rheumatic fever, impressed with the points of resemblance between it and intermittent fever, and bearing in mind that we have in quinine a potent remedy against the latter, there seemed to me a good reason for indulging in the hope that some remedy would yet be discovered capable of exercising a similar, if not equally beneficial action on rheumatic fever.. nature seeming to produce the remedy under the climatic conditions similar to those which give rise to the disease. it seemed to me that a remedy for that disease would most hopefully be looked for among those plants and trees whose …