Sleeping sickness / by F.M. Sandwith.

  • Sandwith, F. M. (Fleming Mant), 1853-1918.
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sleeping sickness / by F.M. Sandwith. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    life, and the greater strain upon their intellectual activity. Among others, he considers one of the most frequent causes to be grief, to which the negroes succumb when they are separated from their wives and home. It is easy to see how he came to this conclusion, for an invariable symptom of the disease is a certain moroseness or melancholy. Clarke, who had studied the disease in patients in their own country, thought it was due there “to smoking diumba, or Indian hemp.” Dr. Corré, a French naval doctor, writing in 1876 of his observations in Lower Senegal, attributes the disease to a kind of ergotism or scrofula and to the moral condition of the people. He tells us it decimated the little garrisons of black soldiers at Joal and Portudal, and he vigorously attacked the question, studying the conditions of the people, the climate, the water, and the food, and occasionally he comes very near the truth, for he notices that most cases occur near the water, and he maintains that the. disease could be prevented by draining and cultivating the land. But the connection between the insect life of the country and the disease does not seem to have occurred to him. He cites many cases in which there are such manifestations as swollen glands, skin eruptions, nasal catarrh, etc. He visited all the principal villages of the country, and found cases of “ Nelavane,’ the local name for sleeping sickness, in most. In some instances the villages had been left empty, the entire population having died or fled. From the Portudal district Gn Senegambia) he reports: “This is the very centre of the Nelavane. The village of Dakann has been swept of its inhabitants by this disease, Nianing is only kept alive by the importance of its commercial situation, Warann and Portudal are bound to disappear, and M’ Bout and N’Gaparou are equally threatened with de- struction. Jungle grass, bush and forest are dense. The villages are ill kept and of wretched appearance, the popula- tion lazy and much addicted to drink, while their numbers are now much reduced.” Here, as elsewhere, he finds the unfortunate inhabitants mostly of miserable physique, with abscesses in the glands of the neck, conjunctivitis and enlarged bellies. Among them are cases where languor, headache and giddiness C
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