THE SLEEPING SICKNESS 165 



the most difficult tasks in the world, requiring the highest 

 scientific qualities. Any serious attempt to deal with the 

 sleeping sickness in Uganda would, it was at length 

 recognised, require the dispatch of a man of proved 

 capacity and experience, provided with full powers and 

 with trained men as his assistants. No such men are 

 provided by the public service of the British Empire. To 

 detach a medical man of recognised insight and experi- 

 mental skill from his practice even were it possible to 

 find one specially qualified for the present enquiry would 

 involve the payment of a large fee, which neither the 

 Royal Society nor the Foreign Office could command. 



What, then, was to be done ? Fortunately there was 

 one man in the public service, recently appointed to be 

 one of the chiefs of the educational arrangements of the 

 Army Medical Department, who had shown himself to be 

 especially gifted in the investigation of obscure diseases. 

 This was Colonel David Bruce, F.R.S., who, some fifteen 

 years ago, established the existence of Malta fever, as an 

 independent disease, by his clinical observations and by 

 the isolation and cultivation of the parasitic bacterium 

 causing it ; and who, further, when employed by the 

 governor of Zululand a few years later (1895) to investi- 

 gate the celebrated tsetze-fly disease of South Africa, had 

 discovered, contrary to the assertions and prejudices of a 

 large number of African sportsmen and explorers, that 

 the horse and cattle disease known as nagana or tsetze-fly 

 disease was due to the presence in the blood of the affected 

 animals of a peculiar cork-screw-like animal parasite, the 

 Trypanosoma Brucei. This is carried by the bite of 

 the tsetze-fly from the blood of wild game, such as 

 buffalo and antelope, where it does no harm, to the blood 

 of domesticated animals, in which it multiplies and proves 

 to be the source of a deadly poison causing death in a few 



