6th April, igio. 



Sir John Byers, M.D., President, in the Chair, 



TRYPANOSOMIASIS AND SLEEPING SICKNESS." 

 By Professor Symmers, M. D. 



(Abstract) 



The Chairman said they were met that evening to have 

 the privilege of hearing a lecture from one of his most scientific 

 medical colleagues on a subject of the greatest interest, not 

 alone to medical men, but to the public. Modern discoveries 

 were constantly confirming the truth of the aphorism enunciated 

 so far back as the fifteenth century by the celebrated German- 

 Swiss alchemist and physician Paracelsus, that disease comes 

 mainly from without, and is not, as a rule, engendered within 

 our system. Now, as they were all aware, many maladies were 

 due to low forms of vegetable life, called, from their resemblance 

 to rods — bacilli — and they had examples of these in typhoid, 

 diphtheria, and consumption ; but there were also other ailments 

 in which the actual cause was a primitive form of animal organism. 

 It was an amoeba which gave rise to malaria, and there was a 

 group of diseases all caused by the presence in the blood and 

 body fluids of a species of flagellated protozoa belonging to the 

 genus Trypanosoma, hence the term Trypanosomiasis applied 

 to this wonderful congeries of maladies. By far the most 

 wonderful of this remarkable group of ailments, which Professor 

 Symmers ! would discuss that evening, was the sleeping sickness, 

 to which at present the greatest attention was being paid. They 

 Sill knew that the recent opening up of equatorial Africa had led 



