44 
FROM ADEN iTO MOMBASA. 
been widely commented upon. The deadliness of the disease is such 
that Col. Roosevelt's friends were alarmed. Many thought him 
reckless and rash to take his life in his hands and to cause his family 
such extreme anxiety by such a trip. He was warned by scientific 
men and the press to keep away from that particular part of Africa 
at least. 
The Sleeping Sickness Commission expressed a desire that 
Theodore Roosevelt visit the camp at Sesse, Uganda, where Sir 
David and Lady Bruce are in charge of the segregation hospitals, 
where the governments of Germany, France, and Belgium, as well 
as the United Kingdom, are working together to find a cure or 
preventive of the sleeping sickness. Seven European physicians 
have succumbed to the disease since the attempts to cope with it 
were begun. 
In appealing to the millionaires of the w^orld and others for gifts 
to enable him to purchase meat to gratify the one and only craving 
of those whose suffering is so intense. Governor Sir Hesketh Bell 
describes one of his visits to the camp in part as follows: 
THE SLEEPING SICKNESS CAMP. 
‘^The patients were lodged in large thatched bandas and were 
divided according to sex and the various stages of the disease. In 
one inclosure we saw a number of infants in whom the first out¬ 
ward signs of the scourge were appearing. Unaware of their 
impending doom, the black mites played and romped to their heart's 
content in the shade of the banana grove, and only the swelled 
glands at the bases of their necks showed that their fate v/as sealed. 
It was sad to think that in a short time those merry peals of laughter 
would become more and more rare and that after a year or two of 
misery all the poor little creatures in whom the joy of life was so 
strong would be laid in the crowded cemetery that I could just see 
between the trees. 
'Tn a row of sheds surrounded by the banana groves which 
supply food for the patients, we saw many of those who had reached 
the second stage of the disease. Most of them seemed to be suffer¬ 
ing acutely. They shunned the cool shade of the broad thatched 
