Reports of the trypanosomiasis expedition to the Congo, 1903-1904, of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and Medical Parasitology / by J. Everett Dutton, John L. Todd and Cuthbert Christy / with a comparison of the trypanosomes of Uganda and the Congo Free State / by H. Wolferstan Thomas and Stanley F. Linton.

  • Dutton, Joseph Everett, 1876-1905.
Date:
1904
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Reports of the trypanosomiasis expedition to the Congo, 1903-1904, of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and Medical Parasitology / by J. Everett Dutton, John L. Todd and Cuthbert Christy / with a comparison of the trypanosomes of Uganda and the Congo Free State / by H. Wolferstan Thomas and Stanley F. Linton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    journey, we visited many villages and made tiresome expeditions to visit those especially mentioned to us, not a single case of illness did we see in which sleep was a marked feature. We stayed for some time at the Baptist Missionary Society’s station at Wathen, in the sutete district, where we received hospitality and assistance at the hands of those in charge of the mission. From here excursions were made into the surrounding district, and a large number of persons brought to us as cases of sleeping sickness were examined. These consisted of a heterogeneous collection of men, women, and children, many of whom were found to be suffering from heart, lung, and other more or less common ailments. Amongst the boys it seemed that a diagnosis of ‘ worms’ was sufficient in many cases to account for the symptoms. Cases of apparent starvation and neglect were also common, and it appeared from what we were told that, owing to there being a general belief in the contagiousness of ‘ manimba’—the native name for what is believed to be sleeping sickness—children and even adults were, as soon as the slightest symptoms developed, liable to be isolated and shunned by everyone, causing, eventually, a state of emaciation and filth which ended sooner or later in death. Apart from these, however, and eliminating the many common ailments, there still remains in the cataract region a class of cases which, undoubtedly, terminate fatally within a year or two. These cases, of which most villages visited by us contained one to three examples, have few very evident symptoms of illness beyond emaciation, and, in some cases, weakness, headache, enlargement of lymphatic glands, and dirty, dry, scurvy skin. Ina proportion of these cases trypanosomes were found in the peripheral blood, and we think it probable that if a systematic examination were possible, the parasites would be found in a much larger number. Trypanosomes have been found in the finger blood both of those cases in which the diagnosis of sleeping sickness was certain, and of those in which the case picture was atypical. In addition, trypanosomes have been frequently seen in the peripheral blood of apparently healthy individuals. The routine method adopted for the detection of the parasites in the peripheral blood of unsuspected cases was the simple examination of a rather thick, freshly-made, cover-slip preparation. All of the following persons were examined in this way :—