Just the Tonic:
a Natural History of Tonic Water
Kim Walker & Mark Nesbitt
Kew Publishing, 2019
Beginnings
This book came about for two reasons: first, Kew's publishing team noticed about 20 books about gin in every bookshop, and none about tonic and second, because Kim and I had noticed that all these books mentioned tonic water (essential for the G&T!) but all those accounts were contradictory. Dates, places and stories relating to tonic varied wildly. The one thing they all agreed on was that the Gin & Tonic developed in India as a way of making palatable an anti-malarial dose of quinine. We had doubts about this story...
Research
Research for the book gelled well with our day to day work. Kim is a joint PhD student between Kew and Royal Holloway, University of London, supervised by Prof. Felix Driver and myself. Her thesis is on the 19th century intersection of botany, chemistry, industry and empire that led to the transfer of cinchona trees (the source of quinine) from South America to Asia, an event with huge impacts on health, livliehoods and landscapes both in the Americas and Asia. Kim's raw material is the thousand or so cinchona barks housed in Kew's Economic Botany Collection, about a thousand pressed plants in the Herbarium, and the mass of related data in Victorian archives and publications.
I'm curator of Kew's Economic Botany Collection and a Senior Research Leader. My interest in cinchona began in 2002 with a grant from the Wellcome Trust that enabled us to recatalogue Kew's cinchona collections. This project first alerted me to the importance of John Eliot Howard, partner in Howards, the well-known pharmaceutical manufacturer of Stratford. In 2007 we had the pleasure of hosting 150 members of the Howard family at Kew to mark the bicentenary of the birth of John Eliot Howard, and the family have been regular visitors ever since. I knew there was excellent potential for a PhD in Howard's work - he advised the government on many aspects of cinchona - and was delighted when Kim agreed to undertake it, and TECHNE and the Arts and Humanities Research Council agreed to fund it.
Getting it right
We agreed that the scope of the book would be defined both by quinine's role as a treatment for malaria, and as the essential ingredient in tonic water, and thus in the Gin and Tonic. We thus range very broadly - but wherever possible using the latest research by historians of medicine, empire and drink. We've used a lot of original sources, particularly digitised magazines and newspapers for the 19th and 20th centuries which have opened new avenues for how and why quinine and tonic water were actually consumed. A certain competitive element developed in finding the most obsure or earliest sources. There's a distinct tendancy for publications on cinchona to repeat the same error again and again, and we have tried to avoid this. We did let one error slip through - that Linnaeus made a spelling error in the botanical name Cinchona, We'll fix that in the next printing. And we hope readers will alert us to any other errors - we have a list!
Kim is an old hand at writing - she has already published two books on herbal medicine - whereas most of my writing has been more technical. I think we made a good combination, Kim bringing verve and I a certain amount of pedanty. We are deeply grateful to two authors who read the manuscript and made excellent suggestions for style and structure - we made a lot of changes to make a complicated story easy to follow. We are also grateful to colleagues in Museum DeTox and other groups who keep us alert to the legacies of empire. We've tried to write a book that is an enjoyable read but nonetheless treats serious subjects such as malaria and colonialism as seriously as they deserve. We were strongly influenced by Rae Wynn-Grant's critique (article and tweets) of the unconscious assumptions in much writing about the history of natural history.
A picture is worth a thousand words
We spent as much time finding images as researching the text, and the hundred or so pictures are integral to our story. We are deeply grateful to those libraries who made their images freely available - a new trend that is hugely helpful to authors and researchers. Naturally, our main source was the fabulous Wellcome Library, but we also drew on the Met in New York, the Library of Congress, The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the University of Minnesota, and even the British Library. Ebay was another important source for prints and clippings. Our biggest challenges were finding high-resolution images of newspaper articles, and getting access to the all-important Schweppes archive. We didn't manage this, so could not feature any of the witty 1960s Schweppes advertisements that are still in copyright. The book's designer, Ocky Murray, did a fabulous job of integrating text and picture.
Final thoughts
We hope readers will enjoy reading the book as much as we enjoyed writing it. We do indeed challenge the anti-malarial origins of the G&T - the word 'tonic' in tonic water is the clue to the Victorian belief in quinine as a general restorative for the body. There is, however, a strong connection between quinine and the liquid in which it dissolves easiest, alcohol. There is lots for future historians to resolve, including the all-important question of when the G&T actually reached Britain from India. We are writing up a scientific paper to more formally document our new findings, but the book includes a lengthy reading list for those who would like to explore further.
Kim's PhD is part of a wider project, with a parallel PhD by Nataly Canales (Copenhagen supervisors Nina Rønsted & Chris Barnes) studying the chemistry and DNA of historic bark samples, and work by Nataly, Oscar Perez and other members of Alex Antonelli's lab on sequencing the cinchona genome. We have already incorporated some of their insights in the book, and look forward to more to come - perhaps in a second edition.
Reactions to the book, which came out in October 2019, have been gratifying, and even we authors are pleased with it. It does fill a particularly useful Christmas present gap, whether for that difficult older relative, or for the millennial who enjoys the new artisanal tonics, with or withour artisanal gin.
Buying the book: Your local bookseller, Kew Shop on-site and online, the usual online sources including Wordery
Reviews, articles and podcasts about the book
Review copies of the book are available from Kew Publishing. Kim and I welcome opportunities to talk about the book - there's lots of good stories - and have already talked at Kew and Daunt's in Hampstead. Do contact us with other ideas.
Author talks to come: Linnean Society of London 13 Feb 2020 Booking
Podcast with Cassandra Quave - we chat about the book.
Review in the Gin Annual 'a fully fledged, jaw-droppingly beautiful book that separates fact from fiction and medicinal from recreational, weaving the botanical, historical, cultural and, naturally, Gin-related nature of this magical drink into some brilliantly linear words.'
Review in the Daily Mail 'The authors successfully bring together the history of quinine, fizzy water and gin in this entertaining, highly illustrated account.'
Article in Country Life.
Article in New Scientist: 'The sparkling history of tonic, from medical miracle to G&T essential'
This book came about for two reasons: first, Kew's publishing team noticed about 20 books about gin in every bookshop, and none about tonic and second, because Kim and I had noticed that all these books mentioned tonic water (essential for the G&T!) but all those accounts were contradictory. Dates, places and stories relating to tonic varied wildly. The one thing they all agreed on was that the Gin & Tonic developed in India as a way of making palatable an anti-malarial dose of quinine. We had doubts about this story...
Research
Research for the book gelled well with our day to day work. Kim is a joint PhD student between Kew and Royal Holloway, University of London, supervised by Prof. Felix Driver and myself. Her thesis is on the 19th century intersection of botany, chemistry, industry and empire that led to the transfer of cinchona trees (the source of quinine) from South America to Asia, an event with huge impacts on health, livliehoods and landscapes both in the Americas and Asia. Kim's raw material is the thousand or so cinchona barks housed in Kew's Economic Botany Collection, about a thousand pressed plants in the Herbarium, and the mass of related data in Victorian archives and publications.
I'm curator of Kew's Economic Botany Collection and a Senior Research Leader. My interest in cinchona began in 2002 with a grant from the Wellcome Trust that enabled us to recatalogue Kew's cinchona collections. This project first alerted me to the importance of John Eliot Howard, partner in Howards, the well-known pharmaceutical manufacturer of Stratford. In 2007 we had the pleasure of hosting 150 members of the Howard family at Kew to mark the bicentenary of the birth of John Eliot Howard, and the family have been regular visitors ever since. I knew there was excellent potential for a PhD in Howard's work - he advised the government on many aspects of cinchona - and was delighted when Kim agreed to undertake it, and TECHNE and the Arts and Humanities Research Council agreed to fund it.
Getting it right
We agreed that the scope of the book would be defined both by quinine's role as a treatment for malaria, and as the essential ingredient in tonic water, and thus in the Gin and Tonic. We thus range very broadly - but wherever possible using the latest research by historians of medicine, empire and drink. We've used a lot of original sources, particularly digitised magazines and newspapers for the 19th and 20th centuries which have opened new avenues for how and why quinine and tonic water were actually consumed. A certain competitive element developed in finding the most obsure or earliest sources. There's a distinct tendancy for publications on cinchona to repeat the same error again and again, and we have tried to avoid this. We did let one error slip through - that Linnaeus made a spelling error in the botanical name Cinchona, We'll fix that in the next printing. And we hope readers will alert us to any other errors - we have a list!
Kim is an old hand at writing - she has already published two books on herbal medicine - whereas most of my writing has been more technical. I think we made a good combination, Kim bringing verve and I a certain amount of pedanty. We are deeply grateful to two authors who read the manuscript and made excellent suggestions for style and structure - we made a lot of changes to make a complicated story easy to follow. We are also grateful to colleagues in Museum DeTox and other groups who keep us alert to the legacies of empire. We've tried to write a book that is an enjoyable read but nonetheless treats serious subjects such as malaria and colonialism as seriously as they deserve. We were strongly influenced by Rae Wynn-Grant's critique (article and tweets) of the unconscious assumptions in much writing about the history of natural history.
A picture is worth a thousand words
We spent as much time finding images as researching the text, and the hundred or so pictures are integral to our story. We are deeply grateful to those libraries who made their images freely available - a new trend that is hugely helpful to authors and researchers. Naturally, our main source was the fabulous Wellcome Library, but we also drew on the Met in New York, the Library of Congress, The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the University of Minnesota, and even the British Library. Ebay was another important source for prints and clippings. Our biggest challenges were finding high-resolution images of newspaper articles, and getting access to the all-important Schweppes archive. We didn't manage this, so could not feature any of the witty 1960s Schweppes advertisements that are still in copyright. The book's designer, Ocky Murray, did a fabulous job of integrating text and picture.
Final thoughts
We hope readers will enjoy reading the book as much as we enjoyed writing it. We do indeed challenge the anti-malarial origins of the G&T - the word 'tonic' in tonic water is the clue to the Victorian belief in quinine as a general restorative for the body. There is, however, a strong connection between quinine and the liquid in which it dissolves easiest, alcohol. There is lots for future historians to resolve, including the all-important question of when the G&T actually reached Britain from India. We are writing up a scientific paper to more formally document our new findings, but the book includes a lengthy reading list for those who would like to explore further.
Kim's PhD is part of a wider project, with a parallel PhD by Nataly Canales (Copenhagen supervisors Nina Rønsted & Chris Barnes) studying the chemistry and DNA of historic bark samples, and work by Nataly, Oscar Perez and other members of Alex Antonelli's lab on sequencing the cinchona genome. We have already incorporated some of their insights in the book, and look forward to more to come - perhaps in a second edition.
Reactions to the book, which came out in October 2019, have been gratifying, and even we authors are pleased with it. It does fill a particularly useful Christmas present gap, whether for that difficult older relative, or for the millennial who enjoys the new artisanal tonics, with or withour artisanal gin.
Buying the book: Your local bookseller, Kew Shop on-site and online, the usual online sources including Wordery
Reviews, articles and podcasts about the book
Review copies of the book are available from Kew Publishing. Kim and I welcome opportunities to talk about the book - there's lots of good stories - and have already talked at Kew and Daunt's in Hampstead. Do contact us with other ideas.
Author talks to come: Linnean Society of London 13 Feb 2020 Booking
Podcast with Cassandra Quave - we chat about the book.
Review in the Gin Annual 'a fully fledged, jaw-droppingly beautiful book that separates fact from fiction and medicinal from recreational, weaving the botanical, historical, cultural and, naturally, Gin-related nature of this magical drink into some brilliantly linear words.'
Review in the Daily Mail 'The authors successfully bring together the history of quinine, fizzy water and gin in this entertaining, highly illustrated account.'
Article in Country Life.
Article in New Scientist: 'The sparkling history of tonic, from medical miracle to G&T essential'
