According to Winston Churchill, the gin and tonic “has saved more Englishmen’s lives and minds, than all the doctors in the Empire.” These days, of course, a case could be made as to whether or not those Englishmen’s lives, as they wreaked havoc over a quarter of the world while ruling their Empire, were actually worth saving. But that is a moral debate for another day. Meanwhile, it was the quinine in the tonic that was responsible for any lives saved. Seventeenth century Peruvians discovered that the bark of the cinchona tree (which became known as the fever tree) could…
