68 
FILARIA MEDENENSIS. 
hardly be doubted they bad brought it with them. In some 
of the older writers—coeval, however, still with the slave 
trade—who have either spoken of or described the diseases 
of Brazil, I find no mention of the Guinea-worm disease, or 
anything resembling it. Pison, for example, simply mentions 
the dracunculus to distinguish it from the gigger , and Luig 
Gomez Ferreira, a Portuguese surgeon, who practised for 
some time in Bahia, and still longer in Minas, in the first 
quarter of last century, and who, in his ‘Erario Mineral/ 
describes many diseases peculiar to blacks, does not speak of 
or even allude to the Guinea worm , which must, nevertheless, 
have been very common in his time. 
Among the writings of the present century, only in 
Sigaud’s work on the ‘ Climate and Diseases of Brazil 3 are 
there related, very succinctly, six cases, observed either by 
himself or by others, and from which nothing can be gleaned 
towards a history of the Filaria medinensis in Brazil. Mar¬ 
tins contents himself with speaking of this parasite as one of 
the many miseries affecting the blacks landing in Brazil. It is 
probable that there may exist, unknown to me, other docu¬ 
ments bearing more directly on this subject; certain, how¬ 
ever, it is that, with the exception of the slight article in 
Sigaud’s work, I have been obliged to rely on my own very 
limited experience and on oral tradition for any information 
I have been able to collect in regard to the Guinea worm 
and its endemic origin in Brazil. 
It being no intention of mine to write a history of the 
dracunculus , either in this province or in the Empire, but 
simply to endeavour to clear up some disputed points in the 
natural history of the worm, it will be sufficient for my pur¬ 
pose that it be granted as an established fact, and on the 
evidence of all the best known practitioners, that since the 
final cessation of the slave trade, long ago abolished by law, 
hut till a comparatively late period carried on by toleration 
or clandestinely, it has been extremely rarely met with. For 
my own part, in a period of twenty-six years, I have observed 
it in only three cases. In one of them I extracted the worm 
from the foot of a Brazilian black, depositing the preparation 
in the Museum of the School of Medicine; the other two 
cases form, in a great measure, the subject matter of the 
present article. Now, tradition tells us that in former times 
the Guinea worm and the diseases arising from its presence 
in the system were very common, as is still further evidenced 
by Sigaud, who says that the Guinea worm “ se rencontre 
souvent dans les diverses parties du corps des negres, ay ant 
un ou plusieurs metres de developpement.” 
