The Unruly Endurance of Condurango in Global Cancer Care

The trajectory of condurango, an Andean vine, included a meteoric global rise in the 1860s as a cancer specific, a fall from grace, an enduring phase as a cancer adjuvant, and a return to various national pharmacopeias as a stomachic, all the while continuing to elicit laments from clinicians who insisted into the 1920s that the vine's anti-cancer properties never got a fair trial. This article contextualizes condurango's unsettled relevance by highlighting the phenomenally diverse and globally connected health cultures of the nineteenth-century Andes. Faith in and disappointment with condurango pivoted on the momentum of a national modernization project, the appeal of non-surgical therapeutic options for cancer, and the consideration of sustained improvements and positive unexpected outcomes as beneficial by healers, patients, and their caregivers. Condurango thus makes for a valuable case study about the influence of policies enacted in/by former colonies on the availability and significance of certain resources; the national and professional variations that shaped the consideration of new therapeutic options; and the importance of family caregivers as stakeholders in cancer care.