"What medical research do you do? Would it bore you to tell me?"
"I have been out in Uganda, doing sleeping sickness."
"Have you?" said Roger. "That's very interesting. I've been reading a lot of books about sleeping sickness."
"Are you interested in that kind of thing?" Lionel asked.
"Yes."
"If you care to come round to my rooms some time I would shew you some relics. I live in Pump Court. I'm generally in all the morning, and between four and six in the evening. I could shew you some trypanosomes. They're the organisms."
"What are they like?" Roger asked.
"They're like little wriggly flattened membranes. Some of them have tails. They multiply by longitudinal division. They're unlike anything else. They've got a pretty bad name."
"And they cause the disease?"
"Yes. You know, of course, that they are spread by the tsetse fly? The tsetse fly sucks them out of an infected fish or mammal, and develops them, inside his body probably for some time, during which the organism probably changes a good deal. When the tsetse bites a man, the developed trypanosome gets down the proboscis into the blood. About a week after the bite, when the bite itself is cured, the man gets the ordinary trypanosome fever, which makes you pretty wretched, by the way."