136 ANIMAL LIFE AND HUMAN PROGRESS 



diseases which they cause were well known to the ancients. 

 The Ebers Papyrus, written at Heliopolis about 1550 B.C., 

 contains an account of a disease, UHA, caused by a worm, 

 HELTU. This record is believed to refer to the " hookworm " 

 or " ankylostome," which, at the present time, is the cause of 

 a profound and intractable anaemia throughout the tropics, 

 and which, in its economic importance, is second only to 

 malaria. 



Another of the diseases known to the ancient Egyptians 

 and still very prevalent throughout Africa is one characterised 

 by the passage of blood in the urine. On the walls of one of 

 the temples in Egypt one may still see depicted the manner in 

 which those about to bathe sought to protect themselves from 

 the ingress of the parasite into the urinary passage. In one 

 of the Pharaohs preserved in the Cairo Museum the late Sir 

 Armand Ruffer detected, with the aid of the microscope, the 

 minute, hard-shelled eggs of the " Bilharzia " parasites which 

 are now known to be the cause of this bleeding. 



The " Guinea- worm," which is common in West Africa and 

 the Sudan, and is met with all over India, often in epidemic 

 form, is referred to by Plutarch in his eighth book of Table 

 Talk, written about 150 B.C., where he relates that " the 

 people taken ill on the Red Sea suffered from many strange 

 and unheard-of attacks, amongst others from little snakes 

 which came out upon them, gnawed away their legs and arms, 

 and when touched again retracted, coiling themselves up in 

 the muscles and there giving rise to the most insupportable 

 pains." An earlier reference to the same disease is seen by 

 some in the account of the " serpents " which afflicted the 

 Children of Israel in their wanderings from the Red Sea. For 

 centuries the recognised mode of dealing with this snake-like 

 worm, which is nearly a yard long, has been to wind it slowly 

 out from the intensely burning or " fiery " ulcer which it 

 causes, usually on the limbs, by coiling it round a piece of stick. 

 The " pole," bearing the "fiery serpent," 1 is thus believed to 

 represent, in symbolic form, an eminently successful method 

 of treatment, just as the " emerods " and the " golden mice " 



1 As seen in the familiar badge of the Royal Army Medical Corps. 



