Page:Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, volume 2 (3).djvu/17

ON KALA-AZAR 125 as June, 1903, for Trypanosoma gambiense, basing his suggestion on a number of facts, analogies and argu- ments, which must inevitably prove correct. Already his suggestion had received considerable support from the observations of Schaudinn, Prowazek, Minchin and Flu, and, vv^hen properly interpreted, from the numerous experiments carried out by Sir David Bruce and others, to prove the transmission of sleeping sickness and certain animal trypanosomiases by tsetse-flies. Of course he (Dr. Sambon) was quite prepared to find a modified life-cycle in the forms which inhabited non-phlebotoraous insects ; but so far as the parasites of sleeping sickness and kala- azar were concerned, if they wished to understand their life-histories, they should compare them with those of similar organisms found in blood-sucking insects. How- ever, many facts in the natural history of kala-azar led him to think that the organism which gave rise to that disease might provide for its dispersion in various ways, availing itself both of blood-sucking and non-phleboto- mous insects.

There was another important question on which his opinion differed from that of Captain Patton, and that was the question of relationship between the various morbid manifestations in which " Leishman-Donovan bodies " had been found.

When Wright described, in a case of Oriental sore, parasites indistinguishable from those discovered by Major Leishman in kala-azar, Sir Patrick Manson sug- gested the possible identity of the parasites found in the two diseases. In the fourth edition of his book on "Tropical Diseases," he said: "If the parasite of Oriental sore be specifically identical with that of kala- azar, it must somehow have been deprived of its viru- lence ; for, although kala-azar is a fatal disease. Oriental