Malaria Awareness Day is April 25

It's Malaria Awareness Day, drink your gin & tonic! Try a Pink Gin Saturday night at the Golden Lion!

Gin and tonics were - like gin itself - originally developed as a medicine. In this case to help fight malaria. When the British were in the East they became susceptible to malaria and eventually found out that quinine, an ingredient in tonic water, was useful for getting rid of the disease. Well, as you would probably expect, drinking tonic water by itself is pretty nasty (unless you've acquired a taste for it) and they had problems getting the British in the East to drink it.

Along comes our friend gin to be mixed with the tonic water, which not only made drinking it much more pleasant, but also created an excellent drink that would be remembered from then on, even if its relationship to the disease was forgotten. So, as you can see, gin and tonic water came about due to medicinal reasons, then caught on later for its more pleasurable aspects.

On a minor note, the lime - served in any good gin and tonic - being a citrus fruit, and therefore containing vitamin C, helps to prevent scurvy. Usually the limes are not the dominant ingredient of gin and tonic, so they won't actually get rid of scurvy if you've already got it - unless you drink a lot of gin and tonics of course.