CHAPTER XX. 



SLEEPING SICKNESS. 



TRYPANOSOMA GAMBIENSE (BUTTON, 1902). 



SLEEPING sickness, African lethargy, Maladie du sommeil, 

 Schlafkrankheit, or human trypanosomiasis is a specific, in- 

 fectious, endemic disease of equatorial Africa characterized 

 by fever, lassitude, weakness, wasting, somnolence, coma, 

 and death. The first mention of the disease seems to have 

 been made by Winterbottom.* 



Sir Patrick Mansonf says that "For upward of a century 

 students of tropical pathology have puzzled over a peculiar 

 striking African disease, somewhat inaccurately described by 

 its popular name, the sleeping sickness. Its weirdness and 

 dreadful fatality have gained for it a place not in medical 

 literature only, but also in general literature. The mystery 

 of its origin, its slow but sure advance, the prolonged life in 

 death that so often characterizes its terminal phases, and its 

 inevitable issue, have appealed to the imagination of the 

 novelist, who more than once has brought it on his mimic 

 stage, draping it, perhaps, as the fitting nemesis of evil-doing. 

 The leading features of the strange sickness are such as might 

 be produced by a chronic meningo-encephalitis. Slow irreg- 

 ular febrile disturbance, headache, lassitude, deepening into 

 profound physical and mental lethargy, muscular tremor, 

 spasm, paresis, sopor, ultimately wasting, bed-sores, and 

 death by epileptiform seizure, or by exhaustion, or by some 

 inter current infection. 



" In every case the lymphatic glands, especially the cer- 

 vical, are enlarged, though it be but slightly. In many cases 

 pruritus is marked. In all, lethargy is the dominating feature. 



"In some respects this disease, which runs its course in 

 from three months to three years from the oncoming of the 



* "An Account of Native Africans in the Neighborhood of Sierre 

 Leone," 1803. 



t "The Lane Lectures for 1905," Chicago, 1905. 



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