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Access to quinine, a drug used to treat malaria, influences the outcome of the Civil War.

1862

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While Union soldiers are originally ravaged by malaria in the South, their resilience on the battlefield increases after they are dosed with quinine. The Confederate Army largely loses access to the drug due to the Northern blockade of Southern ports, which shapes the outcome of the war. The need for quinine is so desperate that smugglers attempt to bring it into the Confederacy "in the heads of girls’ dolls and...stuffed within the intestines of slaughtered animals" (Hicks, 2013). It will later be used in quinacrine, an unregulated, non-surgical birth control promoted by eugenicist doctors for sterilization at the end of the 20th century and into the 21st.