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THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



caravan to make a wide detour to avoid 

 some unspeakable horror. 



The people are brutally inhuman to the 

 victims of the disease. So soon as a man 

 becomes incapable of supporting himself 

 he is turned out of the village to subsist 

 for a short time on loathsome garbage 

 and soon to starve like a dog. So long as 

 I live I shall be haunted by the recollec- 

 tion of one of these miserable creatures 

 who came crawling about our camp not 

 far from Tanganyika. The porters — ■ 

 "our black brothers," as some people 

 would call them — were stuffing them- 

 selves on the fat of the land at the time, 

 and though he was one of their own tribe, 

 they jeered at his infirmities — he could 

 not walk, but dragged himself along the 

 ground with his hands — and refused to 

 give him a scrap of the food for which he 

 begged. Heartrending spectacles of this 

 sort can be seen on the outskirts of al- 

 most every village between the Congo and 

 Tanganyika. 



The Congo State is making strenuous 

 efforts, by the establishment of laza- 

 rettos in which infected people are con- 

 fined, to check the spread of the disease ; 

 but it is a task beset with innumerable 

 difficulties, and the medical staff of the 

 State is hopelessly inadequate in num- 

 bers. Thus, for the whole of the Russi- 

 Kivu District, which is about as large as 

 England without Wales, there are two 

 doctors; for another district, which is 

 roughly the size of Ireland, there is one 

 doctor. So it frequently happens that 

 an unfortunate official who falls ill in a 

 remote station is twelve or fourteen days' 

 journey from the nearest doctor, who 

 arrives only in time to find him either 

 recovered or in his grave. 



CIVILIZATION IS RESPONSIBLE FOR SPREAD 

 OP DISEASE 



It is only fair to say that the doctors, 

 who are mostly Italians, work most nobly 

 and perform wonderful feats of travel- 

 ing by day and night; but it is mani- 

 festly impossible for them to devote 

 much time to the study of native dis- 

 eases or to take very active steps towards 

 preventing the spread of sleeping sick- 

 ness. On our way down the Congo I vis- 



ited three or four of the State lazarettos, 

 which (with one exception) were well 

 conducted ; but with such a splendid high- 

 way as the river itself forms, it is ex- 

 cessively difficult to check the movements 

 of infected but unrecognized individuals, 

 who are a constant source of danger 

 wherever they go. 



It is a lamentable fact, but one which 

 cannot be gainsaid, that civilization must 

 be held responsible in no small degree 

 for the spread of sleeping sickness dur- 

 ing the last few years. In the old days, 

 when every tribe and almost every vil- 

 lage was self-sufficient and had no inter- 

 course with its neighbors, except in the 

 way of warfare, it might very well hap- 

 pen that the disease became localized in 

 a few districts, where its virulence be- 

 came diminished. Nowadays, with the 

 rapid opening-up of the country, the 

 constant passage of Europeans traveling 

 from one district to another, and the sup- 

 pression of native warfare, it is becoming 

 increasingly easy for natives to move be- 

 yond the limits of their own countries, 

 and by their means sleeping sickness is 

 spread from one end of the country to 

 another. The prevention of the disease 

 is by far the most serious problem which 

 confronts Europeans in Africa, and the 

 outlook at the present time is at the best 

 a gloomy one. (See also page 257.) 



Sleeping sickness, properly so called, 

 is the name applied to the terminal stages 

 of trypanosoma infection, or trypanoso- 

 miasis. 



Trypanosomes belong to the Hcemo- 

 proteidce, a group of the Hamoprotozoa, 

 organisms which inhabit the blood of 

 many vertebrates, fishes, birds, reptiles, 

 and mammals. The disease has been 

 known in Africa for more than a century, 

 but its connection with the trypanosome 

 was not recognized until 1902. In that 

 year Dutton, in the Gambia Colony, 

 found a trypanosoma, which he called 

 Trypanosoma gambiense, in the blood of 

 a native suffering from a fever of non- 

 malarial character. In the same year 

 Castellani, in Uganda, discovered try- 

 panosomes in the blood and in the cere- 

 bro-spinal fluid of cases of sleeping sick- 

 ness. He suggested that the parasite is 



