Richard Spruce gave his body and botany career to end empire’s fevers

Evidence

The fifteen years Richard Spruce spent in South America cost him his body. Years of fevers, soakings, and malnourishment in the Amazon and the Andes left him, by the late 1850s, with a chronic, disabling condition of the back and digestive system; he could no longer stand or walk for long. Yet in 1860, barely able to climb, he carried out one of the era’s most consequential botanical missions for the British government — collecting seeds and seedlings of the fever-bark tree, Cinchona, the source of quinine, in the Ecuadorian Andes to seed plantations in British India and Ceylon. — Jamal Awil, The Whispering Archive, 953

Categorization

• SEED: An essay on how empire extracted scientific sacrifice could center Spruce’s quinine mission as cost borne by a colonial botanist.