“Last year,” he said, “strong man like this,” indicating the men who bore him; “this year—finish.”
“He will die?”
“Oh, he will die—soon.”
And the great brawny savages who carried the stretcher, stark but for a loin cloth and a necklace, with their hair cut into cock's combs, had come there with sleeping sickness and were cured. They brought them out of all the huts to show the visitor—women in the last stages after epilepsy had set in, with weary eyes, worn faces, and contracted limbs, happy little children with swollen glands, a woman with atoxyl blindness who was cured, a man with atoxyl blindness who, in spite of all, will die. They were there in all stages of the disease, in all stages of recovery. Some looked as if there was nothing the matter with them, but the enlarged glands in the neck could always be felt. The doctor did not seem very hopeful. “We could cure it,” he said; “it is quite curable if we could only get the cases early enough. Not 2 per cent, of the flies are infected, and of course every man who is bitten by an infected fly does not necessarily contract the disease.”
It comes on very insidiously. Three weeks it takes to develop, and then the patient has a little fever every evening. In the morning his temperature is down again, only to rise once more in the evening. Sometimes he will have a day without a rise, sometimes three or four, but you would find, were you to look, the parasites in the blood. After three or four months the glands of the neck begin to swell, and this is the time when the natives recognise the danger and excise the glands. But swollen glands are not always caused by sleeping sickness, and, in that case, if the wounds heal properly, the patient recovers; but if the parasites are in the blood then such rough surgery only causes unnecessary suffering without in any way retarding the progress of the disease. Slowly it progresses, very slowly. Sometimes it takes three or four months before nervous symptoms come on, sometimes it may be twelve months, and after that the case is hopeless. Not all the physicians in the world in the present state of medical knowledge could cure it. In Europeans—and something like sixty Europeans are known to have contracted the disease—very often immediately after the bite of the fly, symptoms have been noticed on the skin, red swellings, but in the black man apparently the skin is not affected.
The treatment is of the simplest, but the doctor only arrived at it after careful experiment. After having ascertained by examination of the blood that the patient has sleeping sickness he weighs the patient and gives him five centigrams per kilogram of his own weight of arsenophenylycin. This is divided into two portions and given on two consecutive days, and the treatment is finished. Of course the patient is carefully watched and his blood tested, and if at the end of ten days the parasites are still found, the dose is repeated. Sometimes it is found that the toxin has no effect, and then the doctor resorts to atoxyl, which he administers the same way every two days, with ten days between the doses. This has one grave drawback, for sometimes in conjunction with sleeping sickness it causes blindness. Out of eighty-five cases that have taken atoxyl since 1908 five have gone blind. I saw there one young man cured and stone-blind, and one woman also cured and but just able to see men “as trees walking.” Apparently there was nothing wrong with their eyes, but the blank look of the blind told that they could not see.
At first this camp here up among the hills was looked upon with suspicion by the natives, and they resisted all efforts to bring them to it. They feared, as they have always feared, all German thoroughgoing methods. But gradually, as is only natural, a good thing makes its own reputation, and the natives who were before so fearful come long distances to seek help where they know only help can be found.