20 THE HISTORY OF TROPICAL MEDICINE 



Elmassian in 1901 described a trypanosome observed by him in mal de caderas 

 • — Trypanosoma equinum (Voges, 1901). Theiler, in 1902, in South Africa 

 found a trypanosome in the blood of cattle affected with a peculiar disease 

 known locally as ' galziecte.' The parasite was named by Bruce Trypano- 

 soma theileri. Recently several other forms of trypanosomiasis have been 

 described in the lower animals by Djtton and Todd, Cazalbou, Lingard, Ed. 

 and Et. Sergent, Shillong, Martini, Ziemann, and others. 



In the meanwhile, Colonel Sir W. B. Leishman, in the year 1900, 

 discovered some peculiar bodies in the spleen of a soldier who had 

 died of what was called ' dum-dum fever/ but did not publish an 

 account of his discovery till 1903, in which year Donovan also 

 found the same parasitic bodies in Madras. This parasite was 

 first considered to be a piroplasma by Laveran and Mesnil, and 

 called Piroplasma donovani ; but Ross created a new genus for it, 

 using the term Leishmania. Wright of Boston found similar 

 bodies in Oriental sore, which he called Helcosoma tropicum. The 

 knowledge of these bodies and the diseases they cause has been 

 considerably extended by Christophers and by Martzinowsky and 

 Bogroff, while a great advance was made by Rogers, who in 1904 

 showed that by artificial cultivation Leishmania donovani developed 

 into flagellate organisms. The life-history of L. donovani outside 

 the human body has partially been traced by Patton, of the 

 Indian Medical Service, in the bed-bug. In 1904 Laveran and 

 Cathoire discovered a Leishmania in films from the spleen of a child 

 in Tunisia. In 1905, Pianese, in Italy, found a Leishmania in the 

 spleen of children suffering from febrile splenic anaemia. Nicolle com- 

 pleted the study of the parasite, and called it Leishmania infantum. 

 Gabbi, and later Cardamatis, Feletti, and others, have emphasized 

 the frequency of this disease in the Mediterranean littoral and 

 islands. Gabbi considers the disease to be identical with Indian 

 kala-azar. 



In 1903 peculiar parasitic bodies, certainly protozoa, were dis- 

 covered in rabies by Negri of Pavia. Negri's important discovery 

 has been confirmed by many authors, and in the tropics by Cornwall. 



In this section may be described the discovery of the causes of 

 disease due to spirochaetes, the nature and relationship of which 

 arc not yet clearly known. Obermeyer, as far back as 1873, 

 described the spirochaete of relapsing fever, which was thought to 

 be spread by the bed-bug. In 1904 Nabarro, Ross, and Milne, in 

 Uganda, discovered a spirochaete in the blood of persons suffering 

 from tick fever — i.e., a fever supposed to be due to the bite of 

 Ornithodoros moubata — and independently in the same year Button 

 and Todd, working in the Congo, described a spirochaete causing 

 tick fever. This spirochaete has been proved by Breinl and King- 

 horn to be distinct from the Spiroschaudinnia recurrentis, and in 

 1906 they gave it the name of 5. duttoni, in honour of the late Dr. 

 Dutton, of the Liverpool School, who had done so much for Tropical 

 Medicine, and who himself had fallen a victim to this disease. 

 Novy and Knapp had a little time previously assigned the name 

 Spirillum duttoni to the same parasite. In 1914 Inada and Ido dis- 



