Sleeping sickness.

  • Fleming Mant Sandwith
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Sleeping sickness. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    For instance, that great medical missionary and ex- plorer, David Livingstone, found in his travels that some tribes in Africa believed that lion's fat, smeared on the tail of an ox, Avonld prevent the bite of the insect, and for this purpose lion's fat was conveyed from districts where the king of beasts was plentiful. Again, he came across a remedy consisting of the bark of a root unknown to him, which was mixed with a dozen dried tsetse flies, ground together into a fine powder, and then administered inter- nally to the animals whenever symptoms appeared; the cattle were also fumigated by burning under them the rest of the plant pertaining to the root. The chief who told him of this secret and somewhat homoeopathic remedy frankly admitted that it would not cure all the bitten cattle. In Livingstone's writings we find the tsetse fly and its ravages referred to again and again. Thus, in his Mis- sionary Travels, published in 1857, he writes :— On approaching the confluence of the Tamunak'le we were informed that the fly called ' tsetse ' abounded on its banks. This was a barrier we never expected to meet; and as it might have brought our waggons to a complete standstill in a wilderness, where no supplies for the children could be obtained, we were reluctantly compelled to recross the Zouga. Then this keen observer goes on to tell us of the fly, and by our modern knowledge we can see how near to the truth both the native traditions and his own deductions arrived. The cattle, in rushing along the water in the Mababe, probably crossed a small patch of trees containing tsetse, an insect which was shortly to become a perfect pest to us. We had come through another tsetse district by night, and at once passed our cattle over to the northern bank to preserve them from its ravages. A few remarks on the tsetse, or Glossina morsitans, may here be appropriate. It is not much larger than the common house-fly, and is nearly of the same brown colour as the common honey-bee; the after part of the body has three or four yellow bars across it, the wings project beyond this part considerably, and it is remarkably alert, avoiding most dexterously all attempts to capture it with the hand, at common temperatures; in the cool of the morning and
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