Page:Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, volume 1.djvu/172

 particular germ of kala-azar — perhaps none more likely than kala-azar, to be influenced, for atoxyl undoubtedly had a powerful effect on trypanosomiasis — a disease clinically very closely allied. His next case of kala-azar he proposed to place upon atoxyl treatment, and he would do so with a certain amount of hope. Dr. Harford asked him what he considered to be the starting-point of his patient's disease. He believed the patient acquired the infection in India, the regular fever that occurred in 1904 beinor the commencement of kala-azar. He believed -there was a temporary recovery under some influence — he did not know what it was — which persisted for nearly fifteen months, and then for some reason, which he did not pretend to understand. there was a recurrence of the disease. He had had one case from which, almost with precision, the incubation period of kala-azar could be deduced. It was somewhere about ten or fifteen days. A gentleman went out to Calcutta, proceeding at once to a district very near to where the present patient came from, and ten days after his arrival he caught fever, from which he never recovered. That was proved to be a case of kala-azar, and it indicated a short incubation period, but it was reasonable to believe that the disease might remain latent for a long time. With regard to the bodies which Colonel Leishman mentioned as being split off like scales from the side of his culture forms, he had been struck with that feature in the drawings, and had wondered what they were. He could make no suggestion as to their real biological value, but they were facts to be noted, because they were undoubtedly not there for nothing; probably they were an essential element in the life-history of the parasite.