LEPROSY, MALARIA, DYSENTERY gi 
through the mouth it caused vomiting. For some 
years, however, use has been made of a preparation of 
the essential principle contained in this root, under 
the title of emetin {emetinum hydrochloricuni). Six to 
eight cubic centimetres of a i per cent, solution of this 
is injected subcutaneously for several days in succession, 
and this is followed at once by a great improvement and 
usually by a permanent cure ; in fact, the results 
attained border on the miraculous. There is no need 
for care about diet ; the patient can eat what he likes — 
hippopotamus steak, if he is black ; potato salad, if he 
is white. If a doctor could effect no cures in the tropics 
beyond what these newly-discovered means of healing, 
arseno-benzol and emetin, make possible, it would still 
be worth his while to come out here. At the fact that 
a great part of the labour entailed upon a doctor in the 
tropics consists in combating various diseases, each 
one more loathsome than the last, which have been 
brought to these children of nature by Europeans, I 
can here only hint. But what an amount of misery is 
hidden behind the hint ! 
* 
5Ü H: 
As to operations, one undertakes, naturally, in the 
forest only such as are urgent and which promise a 
successful result. The one I have had to perform 
oftenest is that for hernia, a thing which afflicts the 
negroes of Central Africa much more than it does white 
people, though why this should be so we do not know. 
They also suffer much oftener than white people from 
strangulated hernia, in which the intestine becomes 
constricted and blocked, so that it can no longer empty 
itself. It then becomes enormously inflated by the 
