text: Etymology and common names Carl Linnaeus named the genus in 1742, based on a claim that the plant had cured the wife of the Count of Chinchón, a Spanish viceroy in Lima, in the 1630s, though the veracity of this story has been disputed. Linnaeus used the Italian spelling Cinchona, but the name Chinchón (pronounced  in Spanish) led to Clements Markham and others proposing a correction of the spelling to Chinchona, and some prefer the pronunciation  for the common name of the plant. Traditional medicine uses from South America known as Jesuit's bark and Jesuit's powder have been traced to Cinchona.
  Description
  Cinchona plants belong to the family Rubiaceae and are large shrubs or small trees with evergreen foliage, growing  in height. The leaves are opposite, rounded to lanceolate, and 10–40 cm long. The flowers are white, pink, or red, and produced in terminal panicles. The fruit is a small capsule containing numerous seeds. A key character of the genus is that the flowers have marginally hairy corolla lobes. The tribe Cinchoneae includes the genera Cinchonopsis, Jossia, Ladenbergia, Remijia, Stilpnophyllum, and Ciliosemina. In South America, natural populations of Cinchona species have geographically distinct distributions. During the 19th century, the introduction of several species into cultivation in the same areas of India and Java, by the English and Dutch East India Company, respectively, led to the formation of hybrids.
  Linnaeus described the genus based on the species Cinchona officinalis, which is found only in a small region of Ecuador and is of little medicinal significance. Nearly 300 species were later described and named in the genus, but a revision of the genus in 1998 identified only 23 distinct species.
  History