Page:Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, volume 1.djvu/46

 A FEW NOTES ON SLEEPING SICKNESS. By sir harry JOHNSTON. K.C.M.G.

('XFriday, Octoher 18, 1907.'')

What I am about to say is probably well known to all who have studied the subject who may be present to-night. But it might be useful to recall to the meeting some of the old and the new facts about sleeping sickness.

It is fairly certain from the Arab records of Western Nigeria that some form of sleeping sickness was known there about the twelfth century of the present era, and that several notabilities died of this sleeping disease. It was certainly heard of in sporadic cases on the Gambia, at Sierra Leone, and in the western part of Liberia between about 1785 and 1840. Between 1820 and 1870 it occurred with some frequency in the coast region of Liberia. It is not by any means extinct in that country yet. The Mandingo trader, whose portrait appears as a frontispiece to my book on Liberia, and who travelled with me about that country in 1904, died of sleeping sickness at the end of 1905.

Winwood Reade alludes to the disease as one that is well known on the We.st Coast of Africa. This would be about the middle of the 'sixties of the last century. I heard a good deal about the sleeping sickness when I first visited the Congo in 1882-1883, but the disease apparently did not exist then (or was not mentioned to me) east of Stanley Pool. I only heard of cases on the north and south banks of the Congo between Matadi and the sea.

The opening up of the Congo by Stanley's expedition and other agencies seems to have carried sleeping sickness