Page:Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, volume 1.djvu/160

 treatment. He confessed that when the patient went away he never expected to see him again. He experienced almost the same trouble in persuading the patient to go away which had overtaken his brother practitioner when he had attempted a splenic puncture, because none of his orthodox relations had ever been on the Kala pani, and they naturally did not wish him to go. However, the patient came back sufficiently well to pass a medical examination for Government service, and he was now cured, and in the Opium Department of the- Behars. He (the speaker) would not have taken it upon himself to have said that this was a case of kala-azar without actual proof by finding of the bodies had he not seen so many hundred instances of that disease. In all respects the symptoms were typical of the disorder formerly known as malarial cachexia, or splenic anaemia, and now known as kala-azar; it could not be cured by quinine in any form, and the only point in which it lacked absolute certainty was the impor- tant one of detection of the bodies in the blood. Personally, he did not think that any drug would cure kala-azar; the best, and, indeed, the only treatment was complete change of air and immediate removal from the place where the disease had been contracted. With tonics and good food the constitution, even in this very grave infection, might be built up when things were apparently almost hope- less, and Nature, in this way, might ultimately cure the disease.

Major Leishman said that seeing the title of the President's paper, which was " A Case of Recovery from Kala-Azar," he had come to the meeting hoping to get some clue to a successful treatment of this terrible disease There was no doubt that cases of recovery did occur — Rogers and others had reported them — but he did not himself attribute recovery in any of them to a particular