320 
FILARIA MED1NENSIS. 
imported, and in the person of the African slaves. Although 
I cannot adduce proofs sufficient to decide peremptorily this 
question in the negative, yet I cannot, on the other 
hand, believe that those brought forward by my learned 
friend are such as to warrant his deciding it so categorically 
and positively as he does in the affirmative. His reasons 
are the following:— 
“ 1st. Traditional opinions to that effect; the fact of the 
parasite being known to the common people under the 
epithet of the Guinea-worm bicho da Costa; and their 
unwavering conviction that it never showed itself except in 
the person of Africans. 
“ 2nd. The fact that, as far as we know, none of the 
countries, such as Bohemia, Peru, or Chili, bordering on 
Brazil, but having no African slave trade, ever suffered from 
the scourge. 
“ 3rd. The silence of Pison and other authors as to the 
parasite being endemic among us, and these never referring 
to it as a cause of disease among the natives.’ 5 
Traditional opinions on the subject may have no surer 
foundation than that other popular belief that this parasite 
never attacked any other race than the African, though we 
now know that it shows no such predilection where other 
races are equally exposed to the infection. In the cases 
related, of the six attacked with the disease, one only was 
an African, who would appear to have neglected in his own 
person the warning he gave to his masters and his other 
companions; as for the epithet of the “ bicho da Costa,” that 
may have been given it simply from its greater frequency in 
the African blacks, they having either brought it from their 
own country or acquired it on the passage across, from the 
foul water they drank. Besides, among the synonyms of 
the worms, we have that of Dracunculus persai'um, from 
which I should infer it must have some other origin than 
that of Guinea or Medina. I know not if this latter refer 
to the town of that name in Senegambia or in Arabia. The 
Dracunculus, as is well known, is endemic in many parts of 
Asia, where its existence can hardly be laid to the door of 
African immigration; nor its absence, therefore, even if 
true, from the countries to the west, be attributed solely to 
the non-existence of that immigration. 
Pison and other authors, who neither mention the worm 
as endemic among us nor as the cause of disease among the 
natives, do not, at the same time, consider it as exclusively 
seen in the blacks from Africa, already in their time imported 
as slaves into this country. 
