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CHAPTER III. 

 NATURE'S REVENGES: THE SLEEPING SICKNESS. 



AMONG the strange and mysterious diseases to which 

 mankind is subject in regions less familiar to the civilised 

 world than Western Europe, none is stranger or more 

 appalling in its quiet, inexorable deadliness than the 

 Sleeping Sickness of the West African coast. Apparently 

 it has existed among the natives of that region from time 

 immemorial ; but the first printed record we have of it 

 is due to Winterbottom, who, writing in 1803 of Sierra 

 Leone, said, " The Africans are very subject to a species of 

 lethargy which they are much afraid of, as it proves fatal 

 in every instance." One of the latest notices of the 

 disease, before it became the subject of active investiga- 

 tion within the last five years, is that of Miss Kingsley, 

 who saw a few cases near the Congo estuary, but, 

 though she was impressed by the mysterious fatality of 

 the disease, she did not describe it as very prevalent or 

 as a general source of danger to life. The opening up 

 of the Congo basin and increased familiarity with the 

 inner lands of the West African coast have shown that 

 this disease is widely scattered though rarely so abund- 

 ant as to be a serious scourge through the whole of 

 tropical West Africa. Writers in the early part of the 

 last century described the disease as occurring in the West 

 Indies and in Brazil. Its presence was almost certainly 

 due, in those days of the slave trade, to the importation 



