82 V. JANUARY TO JUNE, 1914 
it was given in 1803 from cases observed among the 
natives of Sierra Leone, and it was afterwards studied 
also in negroes who had been taken from Africa to the 
Antilles and to Martinique. It was only in the ’sixties 
that extensive observations were begun in Africa itself, 
and these first led to a closer description of the last 
phase of the disease, no one even suspecting a preceding 
stage or that there was any connection between the 
disease and the long period of feverishness. This was 
only made possible by the discovery that both these 
forms of sickness had the same producing cause. 
Then in 1901 the English doctors. Ford and Dutton, 
found, on examining with the microscope the blood of 
fever patients in Gambia, not the malaria parasites they 
expected, but small, active creatures which on account 
of their form they compared to gimlets, and named 
Trypanosomata, i.e., boring-bodies. Two years later 
the leaders of the English expedition for the investiga- 
tion of sleeping sickness in the Uganda district found 
in the blood of a whole series of patients similar little 
active creatures. Being acquainted with what Ford 
and Dutton had published on the subject, they asked 
whether these were not identical with those found in 
the fever patients from the Gambia region, and at the 
same time, on examination of their own fever patients, 
they found the fever to be due to the same cause as 
produced the sleeping sickness. Thus it was proved 
that the “ Gambia fever ” was only an early stage of 
sleeping sickness. 
The sleeping sickness is most commonly conveyed by 
the Glossina palpalis, a species of tsetse fly which flies 
only by day. If this fly has once bitten any one with 
sleeping sickness, it can carry the disease to others for a 
