44 FROM ADEN TO MOMBASA. 



been widely commented upon. The deadliness of the disease is such 

 that Col. Roosevelt's friends were alarmed. Many thought him 

 reckless and rash to take his life in his hands and to cause his family 

 such extreme anxiety by such a trip. He was warned by scientific 

 men and the press to keep away from that particular part of Africa 

 at least. 



The Sleeping Sickness Commission expressed a desire that 

 Theodore Roosevelt visit the camp at Sesse, Uganda, where Sir 

 David and Lady Bruce are in charge of the segregation hospitals, 

 where the governments of Germany, France, and Belgium, as well 

 as the United Kingdom, are working together to find a cure or 

 preventive of the sleeping sickness. Seven European physicians 

 have succumbed to the disease since the attempts to cope with it 

 were begun. 



In appealing to the millionaires of the world and others for gifts 

 to enable him to purchase meat to gratify the one and only craving 

 of those whose suffering is so intense. Governor Sir Hesketh Bell 

 describes one of his visits to the camp in part as follows : 



THE SLEEPING SICKNESS CAMP. 



"The patients were lodged in large thatched bandas and were 

 divided according to sex and the various stages of the disease. In 

 one inclosure we saw a number of infants in whom the first out- 

 w^ard signs of the scourge were appearing. Unaware of their 

 impending doom, the black mites played and romped to their heart's 

 content in the shade of the banana grove, and only the swelled 

 glands at the bases of their necks showed that their fate was sealed. 

 It was sad to think that in a short time those merry peals of laughter 

 would become more and more rare and that after a year or two of 

 misery all the poor little creatures in whom the joy of life was so 

 strong would be laid in the crowded cemetery that I could just see 

 between the trees. 



"In a row of sheds surrounded by the banana groves which 

 supply food for the patients, we saw many of those who had reached 

 the second stage of the disease. Most of them seemed to be suffer- 

 ing acutely. They shunned the cool shade of the broad thatched 



