6 SLEEPING SICKNESS 



It was, I believe, well known to the African slave 

 traders that natives with enlarged glands were of no use 

 to them, as they always died and could not be made to 

 work. So they were careful not to take any in this 

 condition, but nevertheless took, without knowing it, 

 many cases who had the earliest stages of the disease, 

 and the American slave-owners used to find their slaves 

 dying of this peculiar drowsiness. 



Yet it was not infectious, that is, it was not communi- 

 cated from one to another : the reason for this will be 

 entered into more fully further on. 



In 1890, a French doctor discovered in the blood of 

 a patient from Africa who was suffering from a peculiar 

 fever, a microscropic organism which he recognized as 

 a Trypanosome, but he did not establish any relation 

 between this and the fever, and the credit of first dis- 

 covering this belongs to an Englishman. In 1901 Dr. 

 Forde, in the Gambia colony on the West Coast, had 

 an English patient with a peculiar fever of a chronic 

 and irregular type. He found in the blood a curious 

 organism whose nature he could not recognize, and 

 called in the late Dr. Dutton, who at once recognized 

 the creature as a Trypanosome ; ^ the first one to be 

 discovered in man, though one had been described as 

 the cause of a disease in horses in India some ten years 

 before. 



At first, and for some time, Sleeping Sickness was only 

 known to occur in West Africa, but when equatorial 

 Africa was gradually opened up the disease found its 

 way into Uganda with disastrous results. 



This is believed to be due to Stanley's expedition for 

 the relief of Emin Pasha, which in 1888 travelled from the 

 Congo to the Lake Albert Nyanza. In 1891 the Sudanese 

 soldiers of Emin's force were brought into South Toro 



1 British Medical Journal, 1902, January 4th, p. 42, and November 29th, 

 p. 1741. 



