Quinine is still the drug of last resort in the treatment of malaria, but its commercial importance was greatly reduced after the development of synthetic analogs in the 1950s.
Several species yield quinine and several other antimalarial alkaloids.
At her instigation the bark was collected for malaria sufferers and later exported to Spain. Native peoples, however, had long used it for medicinal purposes. It is sometimes called Jesuits' bark because of the part the Jesuits played in its dispersal. So successful were the Dutch and English in transplanting cinchona to Java and India that until World War II these countries, especially Java, grew practically the entire commercial supply. The bark of the uprooted tree is beaten loose, peeled by hand, and dried quickly to prevent the loss of alkaloids.